Back at it
Clark June 6th, 2007
Back At It
31º29′ South, 71º39′ West
Condesa left Quinteros yesterday, and started plodding north again. I’ve got my friend Pablo with me. He’s currently green with seasickness, curled up in a ball in the aft cabin. He thought this sounded like a lot of fun when I invited him. Not so fun, is it Santiago Boy? He should snap out of it.
That was a welcome respite, to take almost three weeks off the boat for overland travel. Air fares were so cheap on LAN that I couldn’t afford not to do it. It had been almost six months of sleeping every single night on the boat, ever since Buenos Aires. Now I’m glad to be back.
Quinteros was a safe place to leave the boat, and cheap at only $42 for three weeks, but Condesa is filthy. There was some kind of plant nearby that left a coating of dust over everything, and it was a corrosive dust that rusted the stainless and stained the fiberglass. On top of that, some local seabirds were using the roof of Condesa’s wheelhouse as a fish dissection table. I’m taking it one section at a time to clean up the mess.
We’re at about the latitude of San Diego now, but it’s still cold. Supposedly up in Iquique, where I will rendezvous with my new passport, it’s summerish year round.
We stopped for the night at a cove called Pichidangui. This morning a man came alongside in a fishing boat and said he was the Port Captain. He was all upset and said we had to come ashore immediately to fill out paperwork, which would entail putting our dinghy in the water and all that. I did the obvious thing and started the engine, pulled up the anchor, and left in all do haste, knowing that the officials further north won’t care in the least whether I completed entry and exit papers in little Pichindangui. Just leave those little bumps in the road behind and never look back.
We caught a fish yesterday, species unknown, and et it.
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