Sailing the channels of Tierra del Fuego. Twenty-five knots right on the nose, our first blue glacier, night anchor watches and daytime watches under way, and meat that had run for too long.
“Only two days, and we’ve already covered a fifth of the route through the fjords,” the captain says with a puzzled smile. Well, good. We need to get away from familiar places.
The captain is on night anchor watch in the wheelhouse—in other words, sleeping in Nastya’s berth. Nastya and I are sleeping in the aft cabin, and even in my sleep I can’t shake the feeling that we’re on passage, because that is the only time we sleep in this arrangement. I’ll ask to take anchor watch myself tonight; perhaps I’ll get up earlier too. The aft cabin is rather dark and den-like. Without shore heating, it is +7 in the wheelhouse in the morning—better than zero. And under the blanket it is positively warm. It just makes you lazy.
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We woke among the cliffs; the snow that blew in yesterday has almost melted. We are monitoring the wind and wondering whether to weigh anchor now or tomorrow. Our young sailor crawled in for a cuddle, and for no particular reason we warmed up the laptop under the blanket with her and put on the cartoon The Flying Ship. I don’t know what suddenly came over us, watching a cartoon in bed first thing in the morning.
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The captain must have had the same thought. He gave the order:
“Girls, we’re leaving!”
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As we raise the anchor, we look around the quiet harbour in the maze of little islands. A small white house nestles on the shore. It looks inhabited, but last night not a single light suggested that anyone lived there. Only stars, a whole sky of fireflies, and the Milky Way in a pale band. To the north, beyond the hills, the sky is brighter—either because that is where the sun went down, or because Ushuaia lies that way. In the morning, just in case, we waved in that direction, joking: what if Sergey’s family are watching us through binoculars right now?
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The passage began in sunshine and serenity. Leaving Ushuaia behind, Lady Mary entered uncharted waters. We crossed two borders at once: Argentina was left behind, and both shores of the Beagle Channel became Chilean. After lunch, the Beagle Channel itself came to an end. In front of the lofty Isla Gordon, it split into two arms: Brazo Sudoeste and Brazo Noroeste. We are taking the northern one, the Noroeste.
The anchorage in Caleta La Olla looks like something from a film in the sailing directions. The mountains have risen and squeezed the water between them. It is somewhat like the channels around the Antarctic Peninsula, except that there, instead of trees along the water’s edge, there are black rocks, snow and penguins. There are no penguins to be seen here, only fur seals, flocks of non-migratory ducks and the occasional visiting albatross.
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Sometimes we all drink hot tea together in the cockpit; sometimes we take turns going below to warm up. Nastya asks for the binoculars while on watch and studies a dead fur seal with birds circling around it. Poor thing.
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Ten miles short of the anchorage, a headwind and grey clouds set in. The waves hammer the bow so desperately that Lady Mary begins to dance. Despite the pitching, I manage to make risotto and salad for dinner, fry some limp bananas, and not get seasick. By the way, if you ever have overripe bananas that are already unpleasant to eat but have not yet gone bad, slice them lengthwise and fry them in vegetable oil until they develop an appetising crust. The treat vanishes as it is being fried, not always making it as far as the table.
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Beyond the hook-shaped peninsula, the waves disappear. A glacier glows blue to port. Even on an overcast day, it is blue. What will it look like in the sunshine?
Along the beach—peach-brown bodies, graceful necks and small heads. “Lada, come here quickly!” we call to our young sailor. These are the very guanacos from Jules Verne, whose meat turns bitter if they have run for too long.
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The guanacos look at the yacht as if pondering whether to bolt or not. They walk quietly away, then vanish just as quietly behind the evergreen beeches.
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To port, a cliff rises straight out of the water and into the sky. Flag trees cling to its ledges. Dead ahead are a beach and a dense cluster of trees; to starboard, on the edge of a gently sloping hill, stands a coloured beacon pole. A tarpaulin shelter can be seen in the grove, and at its edge ropes have been stretched over the water—a fisherman’s setup, either for tying up a boat or for traps for giant red crabs.
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The anchor held on the second attempt; in 15 metres of water, we paid out almost 100 metres of chain. The wind gusts to 30 knots—nothing unusual in these parts.
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The sailing directions say you can climb the mountain and look down on the glacier and lake from above. Or you can land in the valley carved between the ridges back in the Ice Age and somehow make your way to both the lake and the glacier. The next day, we chose that very route.
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How we lived like the Yaghan people—the local Indigenous inhabitants—how we got soaked, what we found, and whether we reached the glacier’s blue teeth, we will tell you in the next report.
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We still do not know whether our track is being recorded at bit.ly/iridium360, or whether our route is available on our website under the Route tab. Friends, please write and let us know! We are trying to send this report to the website, but we are not sure it will work, because the site has been glitching for the past week. And if it were not for Andrey Shtykh, it would still be glitching now. It looks as though it will need some serious repairs as soon as we get a stable internet connection.
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Friends, thank you for your letters and comments! Today we read aloud a wonderful letter from Pavel. Letters like that motivate us to keep writing and making videos. We cannot reply right now, but we will write as soon as we get back within range.
By the way, did you know that a new video came out on our channel, youtube/c/travelyfamily, the day before yesterday? In it, we laugh at the everyday difficulties of winter at Cape Horn and make double-glazed frames for the yacht in freezing weather.
Sending hugs from the channels of Tierra del Fuego.