Puerto Eden
Clark April 12th, 2007
49º07′ South, 74º25′ West
Puerto Eden
Human beings, for the first time in three weeks.
I was really starting to lose it there, and then El Mono came out of nowhere. Alejandro, AKA El Mono, is my favorite of the Old Guard in Ushuaia, a true old salt. To describe him physically is easy: Santa Claus without the red suit. Wait, I take that back. I just looked outside and he’s at the helm, motoring alongside me about fifty yards away, and now wearing red foul weather gear. The image is complete.
He is originally from Buenos Aires, but has been doing charters out of Ushuaia for quite a few years now and has more trips to Antarctica and around the Horn than we can count. He was very inspirational and influential in some of my plans earlier in the year.
I was reporting my position to a passing ship and he overheard it. It turned out we were coming up different forks of the same channel, and he invited me for dinner at the next anchorage. He had a charter group of six, all men from Buenos Aires, plus his partner Susana, who I’d met before. I didn’t know until last night that Susana had been a notary in Buenos Aires until just four months ago until she gave it all up to be first mate. They’d been dating for years before that.
Anyway, I sat among civilized people, ate civilized food, drank civilized wine, and had civilized discussions about Buenos Aires gossip. Then the guitars came out and we jammed, man.
Before that I was starting to feel like a traveling salesman, not really knowing where I was waking up each morning. While the weather was reasonable I was spending all day at the wheel, finding an anchorage at dark, sometimes after, then falling on my face into a cold dark bunk.
Alejandro needed a little sanity too. His guests are nice folks, but demanding. They don’t clean up after themselves, don’t understand the vagaries of the weather, and all need to be back in Buenos Aires on unrealistic schedules. All through dinner and this morning they were frantically calling on their Iridium phones, trying to arrange passage on the ferry from Puerto Eden back to Puerto Natales, cutting their trip short.
Alejandro came over to Condesa early this morning (not far, since I’d tied alongside him), we drank our mate (pronounced ma-tay, the Argentine national drink, an herb tea drunk from a special gourd with a special straw), and had a long heart to heart. It didn’t escape us that that he and I, for whom sailing is a profession and a lifestyle respectively, were truly enjoying ourselves, while these guys who had paid thousands of dollars for this holiday all had their minds somewhere else. That’s the way I would have been ten years ago. Is that how I’ll be again?
We planned to buddy boat the rest of the way to Valdivia, once he gets rid of the landlubbers, who all own luxury yachts back in Buenos Aires, so I guess aren’t really landlubbers.
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