March, 2012

How the time flies....

...we are already at the end of March and since September we had logged some 2,100 miles. The last three months we have been surrounded by thick rainforests, snow-capped volcanoes stunning fjords, narrow canals, many, many streams and waterfalls, especially since February has been such a unusually wet month. Shinning ice fields with their bright, light blue color astonished us on the rare sunny day each time we had seen one. Patagonia is also about emptiness, during the whole month of February, we have seen only two other sailing vessels. March brought us much better weather, sun practically every day, so we could enjoy Chiloe region, which is a string of 40 islands with many wooden churches, 16 of which are declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We could easily spend here another season and still not cover all the cruising ground that is between Puerto Montt and St. Rafael Glacier. “He who hurries loses his time”, locals say! How right they are...the weather decides all in this part of the world, sometimes harsh but always rewarding. Right now we are back in Puerto Montt, the sun is still shinning, but there is a hint of winter in the air. We still want to go and see few places around here, before we head to Valdivia, where Nikan is going to spend the winter. So what more can we say? Time is running by way too fast...

February, 2012

Northern Patagonia, Ensenada Baja
We are planning to spend this summer cruising between Puerto Montt and Laguna St. Raphael (latitude 46º40'S) including Los Chonos archipelago as well as Chiloé Island. Well, summer here is from December to March with a bit of luck. So far we had been very lucky and had a warm beginning last month (they haven't seen here this kind of warm weather since 30 years!) with daily average around 25ºC, but we knew it wouldn't last and since then it's rain, and more rain with some strong gusts to remind us we are after all in Patagonia. (Some islands were even out of drinking water and had to have it shipped from the mainland.) We provisioned here in Puerto Chacabuco, as well as did a short trip to Argentina to renew our emigration papers for Chile, something we have to do every 90 days. Since the past few days we want to resume our cruising but the port is closed! No cruising zarpes are issued since the local condition is around 25 knots of wind, with gusts to 45+!!! So far this cruising ground is incredible - many waterfalls, rivers, rainforest followed by scrubby steppe - it's impossible for us to describe the feeling of solitude and the grandness of the nature. We crossed path with only two sailboats in the past month! They are many bays we can anchor in, gather drinking water from the many streams around full of minerals from the glaciers' caps and on few occasions we share our anchorage with the commercial ship servicing one of the many, many salmons farms around. (There is a colour wheel the owner can use to pick up the colour he wants his salmon to be!) For now, see a little sample of photos from this remote region in the slide show. We will update you again when we can, as Internet services are far apart...

November, 2011

We reached our destination
Rainbows of flowers cover the only village on the spectacular, volcanic Robinson Crusoe Island (the Juan Fernandez archipelago), today having the population of 600 of very welcoming, friendly people. It was Scotsman Alexander Selkirk, who at the beginning of 18th century spent four years and four months scanning the cobalt horizon for some ship to save him and was an inspiration for the fictional Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe character and in whose honor the island was renamed. Nowadays there is one fishing village, famous for the Juan Fernandez lobster, which is still recovering from 2010 tsunami, that hit them at 4 am with no warning whatsoever. Two percent of population lost their life that early morning, as well as many houses were washed out to the sea and reconstruction is still in progress. As we were leaving Robinson Crusoe behind us, we both agreed, this is one of the most beautiful islands we ever visited. Another five days of peaceful sailing and motor sailing found us in front of Chacao Canal, where the current runs up to 8 kn and so one has to time oneself carefully to get safely through. Now we are finally at Puerto Montt, where after 18 months Nikan will come out of the water and get a new antifoulling paint in preparation for the summer cruising in this area. There are at least nine other cruisers' sailboats that spent winter here and now are preparing to be on their way, some south to cross to the Atlantic ocean, some north to warm waters again and some west to cross the Pacific. As far as we know, we'll be cruising this area alone, and all of them are telling us, how beautiful this cruising ground is. Something we are looking forward to!

October, 2011

Leaving the flowering desert behind us...
“Desierto florido” is how they call this phenomenon that occurs only every three to ten years, when the parched land of desert wakes up to life after a long period of inactivity and starts to blossom, due to the correct mixture of humidity and temperature. We were lucky this was the year! Now, we are back in Valparaiso region (which we visited this spring - for you, fall for us), precisely in a modern yacht club, in Concon, about 20 minutes by bus from Vina del Mar, and we are waiting for a weather window to go either to Valdivia or directly to Puerto Montt. The spectacular shows of bio-luminescent plankton during the nights, as dolphins raced along Nikan, or of any other fish which disturbed the water, slowly disappeared as we moved south and for days we have observed no sea life, except several sighting of whales, one just few meters from us, but on sighting us diving down, to be only seen again from some distance. The spring here is in full progress, and all the flowers everywhere and trees in blossom confused me to such a degree, that for a while I thought the Santa material in stores is some leftover from Christmas, until it hit me that Christmas is not gone, but just around the corner! On the way down we stopped in Yacht clubs of Caldera, on the edge of desert, and than Coquimbo, both of them very welcoming with friendly, curious people, as they don't see too many foreign boats. From Coquimbo we made a little excursion to La Serena, Chile's second oldest city with some beautiful colonial architecture and churches. From now on (latitude 33 South) the weather is going to be influenced more and more by southern depressions, so J-P is going to be quite busy with weather charts!

September, 2011

Getting ready
Our tank is full, yesterday J-P made two taxi-trips to the gas station to bring some 280 l of diesel in preparation for our passage down south. Today it's cutting down and adjusting the new chimney we brought with us from Canada. The new battery is in place, the local dive diver is reserved to scrub the bottom of Nikan from all the weed that made it's home there, all kinds of touch ups are done, bottom plates painted (so the condensation from cold water is easily wiped off), vacuum is out and being used daily - the spring cleaning is in full progress. The sun is showing it's face almost daily now, temperature is going up, nights are warmer, it's hard to imagine we are at the beginning of spring, as we just returned from the full blown summer in Canada. City is sprucing itself for the warm days ahead as well, flowers are being planted everywhere, structures on the beach varnished, houses being repaired and painted, although one can still see signs of a serious lack of money for city's infrastructures. At the next weather window we will cast off the dock lines and say good-bye to Iquique after almost six months we spent here. At the end we are pleased with our choice to winter here, we didn't have any rain at all, temperature was always pleasant, the fish market around the corner, food stores close by, pleasant, several kilometers long boardwalk with lots to observe around, especially surfers and para-gliders who finish their long flights from nearby cliffs on the beach, many prowling homeless dogs, never too skinny as people here feed anything loose, including hundreds of pigeons. We also witnessed many peaceful protests by students, and all kinds of military parades almost every weekend, as well as weekly shows of local talents open to public on the main square. Now some 1400 miles separate us from our next cruising ground – the land of fjords, canals, islands, snow-capped volcanoes of Southern Chile – we hear the scenery is spectacular! and we are looking forward to it, despite the harsher conditions we will encounter, but are ready for.

June, 2011

We walked on the moon: San Pedro de Atacama
It began with a very unusual event for us: while sleeping in an overnight bus, suddenly, at 2:00 am we wake up and see, that everybody is getting up and gathering their belongings. We are at some kind of check point in the middle of nowhere, as far as we can see, and we notice that everybody has to pick up their luggage and open it for an inspection by some kind of agents. Weird...as we are not crossing any border. Pinochet is dead, but it looks like the system structure remains the same. Apparently, this is a control point to nail smugglers of prohibitive substances? We are back on the bus about 30 minutes later. We arrive in Calama at 4:00 am, and, another weird thing, we are supposed to continue sleeping in the standing, by now quite freezing bus till our connection to San Pedro at 8 am, but get kicked out at 7 am and have to wait outside, as everything around is closed, including the bus station. Finally, at 10 am we are in San Pedro! a little town in the middle of the Atacama Desert and one of the most sought after destination in the northern Chile. From this town wide variety of tours are available through the Atacama desert and the pre-Andean summits. The town is situated in the centre of the most spectacular nature scenery of the region. On the main street tour operators, souvenir shops and restaurants line-up one after the other. Before heading to a higher altitude we decide to stay for a few days at this level to acclimatize, and start by exploring the Valley de la Luna, one of the driest places on the planet and the Valley de la Muerte. WOW! surreal lunar landscapes with sand dunes, incredible rock formations - yes we walked on the moon - sunsets here are spectacular and create a superb changing of color all around us and on the distant ring of volcanoes. After three days of perfect weather we are ready to tackle the higher grounds and higher altitude, although some heavy clouds started to roll in during the night. We begin with the Laguna de Chaxa, a National reserve for flamingos. These birds love the salt flats, don't mind the cold, and are concentrated in one of the biggest lithium reserve in the world. As we continue up, we see something, not many Chileans had ever seen here, snow at 3000m! Our tour guide is quite exited, snapping photos as we drive - none of us are though, as snow flurries and no-visibility forces us to turn around. We see nothing beyond 30 meters. (Yes, even here they are talking about unusual weather patterns.) We don't see the lagoons, we don't see the world's highest geyser field, all the roads to these attractions and Bolivia are closed for at least the next three days. We even experience some rain, although this region receives only 14mm of rain a year, and not at this time! Mother nature has the upper hand. So we had seen what many Chileans had never seen, but we don't see all that we came to see. Maybe we'll be back later.

May, 2011

Exploration of central Chile
It takes some twenty-five hours from Iquique to reach Santiago by bus, and so we took an advantage of quite inexpensive internal flights and hopped on the plane. We had an awesome view from the window of the Andes and could see, if traveling by bus, we would have been going for hours and hours through the brownness of Atacama Desert. Our first destination was Valparaiso, only 120 km from Santiago. It's a charming city, with many hills (42 of them!), a maze of steep streets, stairways piled high with colorful, often crumbling mansions, covered with graffiti, that the locals are quite proud of, as they are of the fondness Pablo Neruda, the poet, had of this place. (By-the-way, Pablo Neruda took his name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, not because he admired his poetry, but because he took fancy to that name!) To explore the wine routes, one either has to take very expensive tours, or rent a car, which we did and headed for the best established wine region called Colchagua Valley. We drove through a beautiful autumn scenery, low hills lined with row upon row of vines, the sun shinning through falling leaves, colors of nature indescribable. This is the time of harvest and so the best time to visit and taste some wine. We took a fancy to Carmenere red, one of the wines produced here and recommended by Chileans. On the first day of Easter weekend, and that was the only day we had some rain, we drove to the coast to visit unofficial surf capital Pichilemu. That was also the only place where it was quite chilly and we couldn't but admire the brave surfers in the freezing ocean, and although they wore wetsuits, they had no gloves or hoods and, many of them bare foot, while the watching Chileans, or tourists were shivering in winter jackets and boots. After two days we turned around and headed to the mountains, to one of the favorite weekends destination for Santiaguinos, to Cajon (canyon) Maipu, where we spent the rest of the week in a beautiful, private nature reserve, where we could easily hike on their property, which included some water falls as well. The last week we toured Santiago and felt for the first time, this is a town we could live in. Modern, creative, green, less hectic than other big South American cities we had seen so far - we were sorry to finish our stay there. Now we are back in Iquique, where the whole town is getting spruced up for May 21, celebrating the Battle of Iquique of 1879 and Naval glories in Chilean military history. Workers are washing windows, painting flag posts, polishing bronze plaques, cleaning bird shit from statues, practicing marches and decorating the city in general. We'll be part of this celebration, as they asked us to sail with Nikan out of the harbour (at 6:30 AM!) to welcome with other local sailboats Esmeralda, the 113 m long brigantine of four masts, the training ship for Chilean Navy. Should be fun!