March 26 – Leaving Canal Occasion
Clark March 27th, 2007
Leaving Canal Occasion, where my last anchorage was, a boat must transit Canal Cockburn (unfortunate name) to get to one of the several canals that connect to the Straits of Magellan. The west end of Canal Cockburn is open to the Pacific, and this is where a legendary drama took place for one of our seafaring forebears, the great Captain Joshua Slocum. He actually sailed out the west end of the Straits of Magellan and got blown back into the canals by a storm. He named this area the Milky Way, I guess because the deadly rocks dotting the sea were as numerous and widespread as the stars in the sky. He tacked back and forth all night, only to be met by breakers pounding on rocks at every turn. He called it the greatest adventure of his first-ever solo circumnavigation, and finally seeing the region in daylight, he didn’t know how he’d made it. I’ve now seen the Milky Way myself, and hat’s off to Captain Slocum.
I decided to make a slight historic deviation into the Milky Way, but of course with my modern navigation equipment, charts, and engine, it wouldn’t be quite as adventuresome. I was sailing along, marveling at all the gnarly rocks, when I heard the prop shaft stop spinning. Normally it freewheels when sailing, unless I stop it. I started the engine, tried forward and reverse, and the prop was definitely fouled. I went aft and saw a large strand of kelp trailing under the boat. I reached down and grabbed it, and it was like pulling a cow’s tongue. This thing was like no kelp I know, leathery and tough. I pulled as hard as I could and couldn’t budge or break it.
Much like Captain Slocum, I was now solo and engineless, and this was getting a little more historic than I had in mind. I sailed to where I had a bit of sea room, pulled up the floorboards, put a chain wrench around the shaft, and started moving it around. Whew, the shaft finally came free. The kelp was still stuck through the propeller aperture, so I went aft and pulled the forty foot cow tongue free. This thing was completely unscathed: the prop didn’t even scratch it. Had I not been able to free it, plan B was to sail to some sheltered spot where I would put on two wetsuits, two hoods, booties, then pour scalding hot water inside the wetsuit. With a sea temperature this cold, I figure this would buy me about ten seconds underwater to free the prop before my heart stopped.
I sailed back into Canal Cockburn and the wind came around to the north, so I had to motor the rest of the day. I headed up Canal Barbara, which is the shortest route to the Straits of Magellan. It is also a prohibited route for foreign yachts. This is a ridiculous situation, but I will save my diatribe on this subject for another time. Since it saved me 150 miles over the approved route, I just went for it and hoped I didn’t encounter an Armada patrol, who would fine me and make me go back.
Ostensibly they prohibit this canal because it has not been charted, but yachts have been through many times before, and I have a sketch chart showing a route that is free of dangers. As long as a boat stays on this track, everything should be OK.
I was about five miles from my night’s anchorage, which is about halfway through Canal Barbara, when I noticed that the engine was spitting very little water. I watched it closely, and pretty soon it wasn’t spitting any water at all. Overheating and melting of parts was at hand, so I shut the engine down. I was back to being a sailing boat, short tacking my way to windward up a narrow, uncharted channel. Tacking back and forth, I had to go off the path of my sketch chart and into mare incognita. This was a tense and exhausting business, but thankfully I didn’t make any new cartographic discoveries. Mind you, the engine still worked and I could use it in an emergency, but without cooling water I could only run it for a few minutes, tops, before something bad happened. Yes, I checked the obvious things, like intake and the raw water strainer, and nothing was plugged.
With the last of the light I tacked my way up to the anchorage, the one place for fifty miles in either direction that had actually been sussed out by someone else and was known to be clear. I made my last tack and headed into the caleta, only to find that the GPS position was off, enough off that I pulled a crash jibe to get the hell out of the cove I had now entered. It was a tight turn and I had my hand on the key. I made it through the jibe, sailed out into clear water again, checked all my data, and thought, this HAS to be it. I sailed back in, anchor at the ready, and was still nonplussed to see that the position was a tenth of a mile off. A tenth of a mile isn’t much, but in this maze of fjords and islets, that tenth of a mile could be in a different body of water altogether. Where I am anchored is clear and seemingly safe, so either this is it and the data is just a little off, or I have discovered a new caleta, and I will name it Caleta Relief.
I decided to run the engine just long enough to back down and set the anchor. When I started it, it spit plenty of water and ran like a top. Why?
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