June 12, 2007

Clark June 13th, 2007

27º03′ South, 70º55′ West

I’m flying everything short of the bed sheets, trying to capture what little wind there is.

I have been reading The Arabian Nights, and it almost makes me want to visit Baghdad…almost. What a contrast to read about the Middle East as capital of the world, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, and what a contrast between the Baghdad of then and now. What would we get if we were to combine the Baghdad of the Golden Age of Harun al-Rashid with the Baghdad of today?:

Saying, “Very well, O auspicious day, O lucky day, O happy day,” the porter lifted the basket and followed her until she stopped at the fruit vendor’s, where she bought yellow and red apples, Hebron peaches and Turkish quinces, and seacoast lemons and royal oranges, as well as baby cucumbers. She also bought Aleppo jasmine and Damascus lilies, myrtle berries and mignonettes, daisies and gillyflower, lilies of the valley and irises, narcissus and daffodils, violets and anemones, as well as pomegranate blossoms, but then Sunni suicide bombers triggered sequenced explosions in the marketplace and none survived but the hunchback.

Or:

Soon after sundown, she came with a girl, as we had agreed on. I received them with pleasure and delight and lighted the candles, and when the girl unveiled herself, she revealed a face that redounded to “the Glory of God, the Best of Creators.” Then we sat down to eat, and I kept feeding the new girl while she looked at me and smiled, and when we finished eating and I set the wine and fruits before them, I drank with her, while she smiled and winked at me as I gazed on her, all-consumed with love, but then seven American rednecks in full Kevlar with Armalites burst through the door. We offered them tea, but they spoke only of a cache of hidden explosives.

Quick update

Clark June 11th, 2007

27º14′ South, 70º57′ West

The Pacific high pressure system shut down and the wind died. I motored a violently rolling thirty miles today, in search of a calmer anchorage to get some sleep. The huge swell seems to find its way into every cove and snug harbors are few and far between. It continues to be cold, which is disheartening…cursed Humboldt current. I’m running the diesel heater all the time, and right now I’m drinking a mug of hot spiced wine, the recipe for which I learned in Coquimbo. Chile is a long skinny country, and only seems to be getting longer.

June 10, 2007

Clark June 10th, 2007

June 10, 2007
28º00′ South, 71º13′ West

I anchored last night at Isla Damas, the Isle of Dames, but there weren’t any dames and I had the place all to myself. Isla Damas is a pretty desolate rock, but it has one beach with blinding white sand and some dunes behind, and this made it extraordinary, especially at sunset.

Condesa sailed away from her anchor this morning, and was back out into it at 8AM. There’s been a solid 25 knot wind out of the south, and she’s been averaging seven knots on a downhill run. There are many bays and coves along the way, but I’m trying to pick out the ones that DO NOT have a Port Captain. A simple overnight stop to get some sleep could cost me hours of paperwork, or getting held prisoner again for being solo.

I’m going to hang up up tonight at about midnight, ducking into a nice looking, portcaptainless little cove, making for a 100 mile day and I can still get a good night’s sleep.

Bureaucracy Gone Wild!

Clark June 9th, 2007

Bureaucracy Gone Wild!
31º19′ South, 71º27′ West

The Chilean Armada has finally crossed from the bureaucratic to the ridiculous.

When I checked into Coquimbo, 48 hours ago, I had to take a taxi all the way across town to the Port Captain’s office. This took about two hours in total, and was a bit irritating since Coquimbo was just an intermediate stop and I already had clearance papers all the way through to Iquique. So that I wouldn’t have to do the same again upon departure, the office told me that Anita, the clerk at the yacht club, had a form we could fax to them instead.

Dutifully I went to see Anita on Friday afternoon to have her fax the form informing the Port Captain of my departure at 8AM Saturday. The computer was down and she lost the form, but eventually little Anita pulled it together and faxed in the form. I ran some errands and came back later. Anita informed me that they would not give me port clearance because the minimum safe number of crew was two, and I was only one. Anita is not a great thinker, so the ridiculousness of this was lost on her, but I persuaded her to call the office and plead my case, figuring I had a better chance with the yacht club acting as my intermediary. She got off the phone and told me I had to go in person. I took a taxi all the way across town and appeared at the Port Captain’s office…again.

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Seafood Lover’s Paradise

Clark June 8th, 2007

Condesa just spent her second night in Coquimbo. This is a part of Chile you don’t read about in the guidebooks. It’s a bit off the tourist track, which makes it that much better. There is yet another friendly little yacht club here, completely free for visiting yachts, with hot showers and amenities. Pablo left this morning on a bus back to Santiago.

We had a meal yesterday that I will always remember among the five or six truly spectacular meals of my life. It is the stuff of legend that in California back in the ‘20´s you could bring up two abalones and a lobster on a single breath of air. Or up until thirty years ago you could get a dozen oysters on the half shell for a dollar in Louisiana. On the Chillean coast this is still reality.

Yesterday, in celebration of our arrival after an all-night sail, we went to a restaurant, a picá, right where the fishermen offload their catch. We started with a scallop and cheese empanada, the best empanada I have ever had in my life…scallops just caught that morning. This was followed by a bowl of shellfish soup that if it could be assembled in California, and it couldn’t, would cost $100. It had at least ten different kinds of shellfish, and the only shells in the bowl were the tips of the crab claws, just so you could pick them up with your fingers and eat the mouthful of meat attached. There were chunks of lobster and abalone, clams, shrimp, scallops, locos, machos, and other things I don’t even know the names of, all for four bucks. When we arrived the place was empty, but by the time we left it was packed with the lunch rush with men in business suits elbowing their ways among the fishermen. We shared a table with a few businessmen, who confirmed that this was indeed as fresh and good as it gets.

Supposedly it’s like this in every little town along the coast going north, so henceforth my trip will be a seafood tasting tour of nothern Chile.

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.

Back In Santiago

Clark June 1st, 2007

Away from the sea and up in the Andes. I went to Bariloche, Argentina, to visit the Fenley family, who have somehow managed to attain the ultimate expat dream, earning a US salary while living in an Argentine ski town. We had a great few days of road tripping and hiking, but then a bad flu descended over the house, and the rest of the week was spent lying around. I’m still hacking.

Santiago failed to impress on my first run though. The smog was thick and I couldn’t even see the mountains. Since I’ve been gone the rain cleared away the smog and the snow covered the Andes. Now you look up and see 20,000 foot mountains towering over the skyscrapers.

Unfortunately I will be here until Monday because I have to renew my passport. I tried all day today, but it all ended in the ultimate two-pronged frustration, wrestling with a US government agency, and trying to get things done in a South American city on a Friday.

My Nazi Lunch

Clark May 28th, 2007

While taking advantage of low airfares to do some overland travel, I was recently passing through Puerto Montt, Chile, changing from plane to bus, and had a spare hour to have some lunch. I went into sort of a pastry shop that had an executive lunch menu. It was spotless and decorated with frilly things. I ordered and then noticed the giant mural on the wall, a blown up photo of a couple. It said, in bad Spanish, “Heinz Rodenbeek and Hedwig Otten, founders of this restaurant, in Osorno in 1959. They introduced unknown specialties to this region (with examples in German).” This was all well and good, and the couple looked happy and respectable, except for the Nazi uniform!

Not subtle at all…full Nazi soldier togs with the eagle and swastika on his right breast, just below his young wife’s smiling face. I asked the waitress, who was completely clueless.

I couldn’t stop staring at the photo. The restaurant was filling up, but nobody else seemed to take note. Am I the only one here who notices the giant Nazi on the wall? Is there anyone else who is even mildly disturbed by the big Nazi staring down on us?

Nineteen fifty nine would have been a pretty bizarre time to be wearing a Nazi uniform, fourteen years after the fall of Berlin. If the photo was taken in Germany, that would have probably been the most objectionable place in the world to be seen in a Nazi uniform. The guy could not have been parading through the streets that way, so did he take his old uniform to the photo studio and specially wear it just for the photo?

When I finished my lunch I took it up with the owner. She pretty much stonewalled me. She said that they were her parents. I said, “But he’s wearing a Nazi uniform.” “Well, that was a long time ago.” “But that would have been 14 years after the war.” No answer. I didn’t know how to say objectionable in Spanish, so I asked, “Isn’t it a bit controversial to have a man in a Nazi uniform on your wall in a public restaurant?” “They are my parents.”

The lunch rush was in full swing and she was looking at me like I was a really irritating tourist who was wasting her time.

With my relentless investigative reporting, I found that Osorno is actually a town in southern Chile, so the photo was taken here rather than Germany. Were they just poor immigrants who came to the New World with nothing but their Nazi uniforms on their backs? Had he no other formal clothes to wear for the photo? I don’t think so.

There have always been tales and rumors about all the Nazis who fled to South America after the war, but this brought it a little closer to home. Elie Weisel found Josef Mengele by looking him up in the Buenos Aires phone book, after all.
coast 058

Testing Flickr photo tool

admin May 22nd, 2007

How cool is this thing? Photos below are a set from Buenos Aires.

Sailing Memories

Clark May 21st, 2007


Condesa is revealed above at her new home at the Club de Yates Quinteros, about twenty miles north of Valparaiso. Condesa’s next door neighbor, seen just beyond Condesa in the photo, is an Islander 36. Ahh, the Islander 36…

I was an innocent lad of eighteen when I was shanghaied into sailing on an Islander 36, and look at the ruin my life has become because of it. My cousins Rocky and Joe bought her the year before, christened her Starwake, and set off to sail her to New Zealand and back. They stopped in Newport Beach on their way south, and my brief tour aboard was a watershed event. I had always been a powerboat passenger, and never understood why anyone would want one of these slow, complicated sailboats. When I saw the provisions stowed behind netting, the diving and fishing gear, the surfboards tied up in the v-berth, and the windsurfers in chocks on deck I asked, “Where did you say you were going?”

“The South Pacific, man.”

Nine months later I was about to graduate from high school and got a fateful phone call from my dad: “Your cousins Rocky and Joe called me from American Samoa. Their third crewmember jumped ship and they thought you’d make a good substitute. If you want to do it, I’ll buy you a plane ticket as a graduation present. Your mom is going to kill me.”

Two days after graduation I landed in American Samoa. Rocky and Joe both had beards down to their bellies and scabs on their faces from a brawl with a couple of Samoan guys a few days before. The boat was pretty bare bones to begin with, but by this point in the voyage Starwake had lost her engine and toilet. We were definitely Crusty Cruisers. This was before GPS so we navigated by sextant. The first week I was so green with seasickness that I swore I’d fly home from the first landfall. There was no airstrip at Penrhyn Island, but I felt better by then and ended up having the adventure of my young life.

One night on watch that summer I watched a ball of fire crash into the Pacific. A small miracle was that Rocky found a 35th page newspaper article several months later, which gave the exact latitude and longitude of a Russian satellite that crashed just a hundred miles behind us. I was probably the only eyewitness.

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