December 18, 2002
54 degrees 56 minutes South 67 degrees 37 minutes West
Puerto Williams, Chile
Merry Christmas!
After a wonderful two-month trip south down Chile's channels, Hawk reached the naval base of Puerto Williams on Isla Navarino less than a degree north of Cape Horn in early December. We then spent ten restful and relaxing days tied up to the Micalvi - a half-sunken ship that serves as the local yacht club - before we cleared for Cape Horn. We expected to take a week to ten days to make the 180 nautical mile round trip, but just over twenty-four hours after leaving Puerto Williams, at 1330 on December 14th, we had the infamous headland to port in absolutely perfect weather. A few minutes later, we spoke Cabo de Hornos Control. Two and a half days after we left, we were back in Puerto Williams tied up to the Micalvi with Cape Horn behind us.
Isla Hornos - Horn Island - is the southernmost of a group of fractured islands called the Wollastons that lie fifteen miles south of Isla Navarino, across the shallow and often confused waters of Bahia Nassau. Boats wanting to go "to the Horn" (as opposed to "rounding the Horn" - which requires sailing non-stop from 50 degrees South to 50 degrees South from one side of South America to the other) have to get a special cruising permit from the Chilean navy. This zarpe allows yachts to anchor in a single anchorage in the Wollaston Group, Caleta Martial, and specifies the exact route they must take in sailing around the Horn. The sailing was pretty uneventful except for six hours of beating into SW winds of 45 to 50 knots true (with a few gusts to 60 - the first time ever we've seen that much), right when we were closing with Isla Wollaston and trying to reach our anchorage late Friday night. Hawk was extremely impressive and managed to claw her way right into that wind. The rest of the time we had light to moderate westerlies except when we were passing by the southern coast of Isla Hornos - when we had light easterlies right on the nose!
The actual Cape was more impressive than we expected, a 1,400 foot high cliff rising sheer out of the sea with the Southern Ocean swell breaking in seething white walls at its base. The rest of Horn Island is low and eroded, most of it only a couple of hundred feet high, so the bare rock faces of the "Great Cape" tower above the green land rolling down toward sea level, dwarfing the rest of the island from every vantage point. The northwest corner of the island surprised us even more - here two eroded spires of bare rock hundreds of feet high have been carved by the wind and the water so that they each resemble the facade of a cathedral complete with towering doors and arched lintels. Cathedral Rocks, as they are called, demonstrate the incredible power of the unceasing swell as it slowly digests the island. At their bases, the waves break in huge plumes of whitewater over the jagged teeth of partially submerged rocks, and the sea seethes in colors from cobalt blue to mint green under the maelstrom of spume.
The trip would have been picture perfect except for early Saturday morning when a Chilean Naval ship called us and told us that our EPIRB (emergency beacon that sends a distress signal and position to a satellite) had gone off and a search had been mounted for us. We attempted to explain that our EPIRB had certainly not gone off, but they were convinced it had. They directed us to proceed to Caleta Martial where a Navy cutter met us and six of its crew boarded us, checked our EPIRB and inspected Hawk for damage before they would let us continue our voyage. They found us and Hawk in fine condition and the EPIRB switch still sealed. It turns out that a 35-foot German boat with two people on board got into trouble just to the west of Cape Horn on a voyage from Tahiti and we were somehow confused with them. Their EPIRB has been recovered but nothing else has been found after a five day sea and air search. The sobering reality of this disappearance has cast a long shadow over all the yachts here in Chile.
While seeing Cape Horn rounds out our Chilean voyage, it felt to a certain extent like an anticlimax. For both of us, entering the Beagle Channel after our sail down the length of the Atlantic remains the crowning moment of our last year and a half of cruising. But the image of the rocky headland and sheer, scree-covered cliff will remain one of the highlights of our cruising experiences.
What's next for Hawk? We intend to leave here in mid-January and head east. We hope to reach Australia this summer season, but may detour to South Africa. You can continue to reach us at this e-mail address. For the next month we will have full Internet access, so feel free to get in touch. We'd enjoy hearing from you!
Enjoy the holiday season,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
November 8, 2002
51 degrees South 74 degrees West
Canal Sarmiento, Chile
Hello Everyone -
We have been having a wonderful trip south down the channels. After the horrible weather that kept us in Puerto Montt for five days after we had cleared out because the port was closed, we managed to slip out on the one day the port was open and then snugged up in a good harbor for another week of bad weather. Since then, the weather has been most unusually benign with high pressure systems setting up as far south as 55 degrees and bringing us light winds, bright sunshine, unlimited visibility and fine downwind sailing. We wake every morning to the continuing blue sky and can hardly believe it after last year's unremitting rain and total lack of visibility. Just to be able to see the awe inspiring scenery makes this trip completely different from last year's - snow-capped mountains, rugged ridges and low headlands receding in green and blue waves on every side. And it goes on and on, day after day, for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Two days ago we tried to reach the Peel glacier, where Tilman took Mischief to make his crossing of the Patagonian ice cap. We encountered small bergy bits five miles from the entrance to the first fjord that accesses the glacier, and when we were within two miles of it we were threading our way through growlers and small bergs. We got to within a mile of the entrance to the fjord, still some seven miles from the glacier face, and we could see that the whole entrance was choked with ice and it was coming out at a rate of two or three knots on the ebb tide. While Tilman was climbing, ice damaged Mischief's propeller as her crew tried to find a safe harbor and got themselves almost embayed, and he ended up having to sail out 50 miles or so through the channels before he could head offshore. We took a lesson from his book and turned back, despite the tantalizing lime green of the water and the beauty of all those little ice bergs. But we were able to see the glacier rising over the rugged, gray mountains in front of it for most of the day, and that was well worth the effort even if we didn't manage to get to the face itself. We'll have lots more glaciers to visit in the Beagle, when the summer is more advanced and the ice a bit more manageable.
We can hardly believe what a contrast it is to go south instead of north. We have sailed most of the 800 or so miles since we left Puerto Montt, and when we haven't been able to sail it has been for lack of wind rather than for too much or too far forward. It is such a pleasure to have the wind aft of close-hauled, and Hawk has been sailing beautifully, often managing 5 and 6 knots in fewer knots than that of apparent wind. We also have current with us much of the time, so instead of struggling to motorsail at 5 knots, we're often doing 9 or 10 knots and reaching our planned anchorage hours earlier than we anticipated. Of course, the weather has been unusually mild, but while we can't speak from direct experience to the difficulty of the trip from Panama to Chile, we can say we would strongly recommend taking the channels from north to south instead of the other way around.
We're not a bit more than halfway down the coast and still planning on Puerto Williams for Christmas. We hope this finds everyone happy and healthy and enjoying life as much as we are.
Best wishes,
Beth and Evans
October 1st, 2002
Puerto Montt, Chile
Hello everyone -
It has been a very long time since we have sent out a Hawk update. We arrived here in Puerto Montt in mid-April and here we have stayed, except for one extended visit back to the States each, since. We have watched fall and winter and spring in Puerto Montt, and they all look alike - endless rain with gales once a week or so. But the weather has actually been much less tempestuous than in Ireland, and we've enjoyed the respite after so many miles sailed in our 2001/2002 season.
Despite the current forecast for ten days of rain, highs in the low fifties and a gale here or there, spring is slowly arriving in Chile. In the next day or two we will be leaving our winter berth and getting back underway, heading south toward the Beagle channel and the Horn for our second visit to the bottom of South America. It unfortunately seems to be an 'el nino' spring with more rain than normal (read "constant deluge") but at least it seems like we will have the winds with us rather than the constant head winds we had coming North last fall.
It will take us about three months to get back down to Puerto Williams. We hope to arrive in time to share Christmas with a number of friends at the Chilean naval base yacht club, the half-sunken supply ship, the Micalvi. In the meantime, our e-mail contact will be pretty limited. We have organized it so we can send regular Hawk updates, so expect to hear from us once a month or so. But we will not have direct access to this e-mail address again until we reach the Beagle in December. Beth's dad will look over any e-mails and let us know by Inmarsat C if there are any really urgent ones. We'll let you know when we're back in cyber-cafe land and look forward to hearing all about your adventures then.
We hope you all have a good season, be it summer or winter in your part of the world, and we'll share our voyage south when we're able.
Fair winds!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
Leaving Puerto Montt
April 15, 2002
Marina del Sur, Puerto Montt, Chile
44 degrees minutes South 74 degrees
Hello everyone!
After a bit over two months spent sailing into the wind and against the current in the Chilean channels, we have returned to civilization. We have been luxuriating in long hot showers, delicious meals prepared by somebody else, sending and receiving mail and having a choice of food beyond what was on board the boat when we left Ushuaia! We have yet to re-acclimate to carrying money, to motorized vehicles whizzing by us, and to the people crowding the markets and sidewalks. We also haven’t gotten used to seeing garbage in the water and smelling diesel fumes, paint, varnish, raw sewage and the other thousands of smells we hardly noticed before being in the channels. We really did see land untouched by man’s hand or turned to his purposes, still pristine, untamed and majestic. Dolphins escorted us into and out of almost every anchorage, sea lions played with us when we took the dinghy out to explore, and a dozen different species of seabirds fed in flocks of hundreds over seething shoals of fish.
While I can’t even begin to capture two months spent in the channels in a short update, a couple of days in late February may help to give some sense of what it was “really like.” Monday, February 25th, found us in the outer harbor of Bahia Welcome, secured in a cove only twice the width of our beam with shorelines from all four corners and anchors set off the bow and the stern, having sat out an “aviso de malo tiempo” – advisory of bad weather – calling for 50 knots with gusts in excess of 70 knots. But aside from some halyards rattling at the masthead, a few gusts off the hills and wind-whipped water flowing out of the inner harbor 300 yards off our bow, we thought the bad weather had never materialized. That morning, we woke to glassy calm in the anchorage and decided we had been sitting long enough.
It took us well over an hour to get all the lines back aboard and the anchors up, and while we were working a pod of a dozen Peale’s dolphins played around the boat, throwing themselves out of the water to see what we were doing. Given the calm conditions in the cove, we expected to find little or no wind. But when we came out from behind the point of land between our anchorage and Canal Smyth, we found the channel covered in a seething mass of whitecaps and spindrift. We headed out anyway, and even put the sail up and tried to make some headway, but within ten minutes of entering the canal we had given it up and headed back in the anchorage. The wind was blowing straight down the channel at a steady 28 true, gusting over 30, and in combination with a foul current we weren’t able to make more than two or three knots over the ground. We now realized how incredibly well we had been protected from the north and northwest. Given the mirror calm in our little corner that morning, we must have had in excess of 40 knots over the preceding days to feel anything at all.
We got up early the next day and headed out to find almost calm conditions, though what wind there was still blew straight down the channel at us. We made some good miles before the wind came up, not from the southwest as forecast, but out of the northwest once again, and we found ourselves motor sailing into the usual 20-25 knots. The rest of the day turned into a depressing slog as the wind continued to build and we fought to make headway against both wind and current in pouring rain that limited visibility to a couple hundred feet. By mid-afternoon I was really wondering why were down here and dreading every one of the six hundred miles or so we still have to cover to reach Puerto Montt. Evans’s mood was little better than mine as we entered Canal Sarmiento and tacked slowly along the coast of Isla Carrington, taking advantage of the slight lee beneath every headland to reduce the wind from 30-35 knots apparent to something under thirty. When we closed with land, we could see tangled forests climbing the rocky headlands studded with dozens of waterfalls whose tops disappeared into the low clouds, but even these failed to lift my mood. All I could think of was how pretty this channel would be in the sunshine, how beautiful the snow-capped mountains of the Cordillera Sarmiento that runs behind the island we were tacking along, and how depressing it was to go day after day without seeing anything.
When we closed with our anchorage, we were both weary and ready to be done with the day. Caleta Moonlight and Shadow, named for the yacht that first explored it, lies at the top of Isla Piazzi, just before Estrecho Nelson, one of the major passages from the Pacific Ocean into the canals. We tacked across the channel to Piazzi and started running along it looking for the narrow entrance to the anchorage, a two-mile long, almost totally straight loch. I use the Scottish term because this felt so much like Scotland – not the high mountains and bare rock of the islands we had been seeing for the last ten days or so, but low and soft and green.
The entrance lies between a small island and the southern headland at the mouth of the loch. The passage through would have been terrifying if we hadn’t been to Puerto Hoppner on Staten Island. About fifty feet wide with a few rocks on the island side, at high tide we had to rely on the kelp to tell us where the shoal areas were. As we were passing through this narrow channel, I saw something in the water ahead of us. It disappeared and then flew out of the water at us – a pair of Peale’s dolphins greeted us as we came through the entrance. They accompanied us up the narrow channel, throwing themselves out of the water completely, turning on their sides as they fell to see us as we motored by.
Their antics revived us, as did the incredible beauty of the long loch we had entered – not the awesome, mind-boggling, majestically indifferent beauty of most of Patagonia but the soft, welcoming, intimate beauty of Scotland or Ireland. It felt as if we were motoring through a high alpine river, not a sea level channel. Within two boat lengths on either side of us, water lapped against rocks and overhanging mats of mossy vegetation and gnarled roots of the tangled jungle of beech trees. The open feel of the terrain and the wide sky overhead, after weeks of being closed in by high mountains on all sides, made us feel light and free. The rain had stopped and the sky was brightening, and we could see the channel running out of sight ahead of us. As we approached the pool where we were supposed to anchor, we saw an eruption from the water ahead of us. Five dolphins threw themselves straight up in the air, then crashed sideways into the water throwing up huge splashes. After that, they swam rapidly toward us all five abreast, surfacing in perfect synchrony, then slowed and milled around the boat while we dropped the anchor and settled back on it.
We had almost forgotten the ease and simplicity of just anchoring. Not having to launch the dinghy, take stern lines ashore, position the boat, worry about it swinging into land and all the rest of the rigmarole when we’re tired and hungry after too long a day of too much wind and too much rain and too much cold – just drop the anchor, put on the snubber, back down on it and go below. So simple…
In the absolute silence after Evans shut off the engine, I could hear the dolphin’s sharp inhalations and several different birds calling in the trees around the anchorage. Not a breath of air moved across the water. We were totally protected by the low trees on every side. I turned to look back down the channel behind us and was surprised to realize the sky had cleared almost completely. For only the second time we could see the high, glacier studded peaks of the Sarmiento range about fifteen miles to the west of us. The silver sheet of mirror calm water reflected the vegetation on either side, which in turn framed a snow-capped peak rising above the rocky mountains in front of it.
“I’ll sleep well tonight,” Evans said.
We plan to spend the next few months here in Puerto Montt. I have an office overlooking the marina, and I’m already into a major writing project. Evans will be going back to the States in mid-May, and then will be getting Hawk ready to go south. We think we’ll be heading back down the channels starting in September. After working so hard to get here, we’re looking forward to going with the wind, taking our time and seeing the places we liked most or didn’t get to on the way north and spending more time in the Beagle Channel.
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
February 13, 2002
54 degrees 33 minutes south 71 degrees 55 minutes west
Caleta Brecknock, Canal Ocasion, Peninsula Brecknock, Chile
Hello everyone -
We have left the Beagle Channel and begun our 1,500 mile-run up the coast of Chile against the prevailing winds. Right now we are tucked back into a tiny little cove at the head of a narrow fjord surrounded by gray cliffs almost bare of vegetation. The only trees, stunted beech trees no more than twenty feet high, in the entire three-mile long fjord lie in this cove, on low hummocks to either side of us and up the slope behind us, and we've tied four shorelines to them and pulled ourselves within twenty feet of shore. As we'd been told and now learned at first hand, such trees indicate places where shelter can be found from the incessant wind, and pulling the boat right back into them is the best way to ensure a decent night's sleep. We've been glad of the protection - the wind has been blowing at gale- to storm-force for the last three days, and we've had regular squalls of hail and sleet which lay blankets of snow on the high peaks around us. The temperatures have been in the forties, but our heater has kept the cabin cozy. And this is high summer!
Our fjord lies off the entrance to the Cockburn Channel, a wide channel between the Beagle and the Straits of Magellan that opens out into the Pacific. When we round this corner, we'll go up one of three channels to the Magellan, on a northerly course for the first time since we rounded the northwest corner of Iceland in June. We hope to reach Puerto Montt in April or May, head back to the States for a bit during the southern winter, and then back to Hawk to sail some more in the northern (warm!) parts of the Chilean channels before heading back down here again next year. Of our last six weeks of sailing, the most spectacular by far has to be the northeast arm of the Beagle Channel.
The Beagle splits at Punta Divide on Isla Gordon, about 80 miles west of the eastern entrance from the Atlantic, and the northeast arm runs for close to thirty miles along the length of that island before terminating in a confusion of passes, islands and canals. Along its length, a half a dozen major glaciers roll in huge, frozen white and blue waves down from the peaks to reach sea level in the channel itself. Born eons ago in the frosty air of the 6,000 to 8,000 foot high peaks to the north of the channel, and fed by the year-round snow squalls at those altitudes, the brilliant white snowfields at the top of these glaciers cover the shoulders and bowls under the stony peaks before spilling down the ravines between the massifs in rivers of white ice cut by horizontal fractures caused by the slow slippage of highly compacted ice down the steep slopes. When illuminated by the sun, incredible colors flash from the walls of ice within these striations - the breathtaking blue of topaz and the hard green glow of emerald. Beyond the end of the Beagle Channel, a half dozen more glaciers covering an area of several hundred square miles terminate at the tops of long fjords accessible from the main channel. These can be seen in the mountains to the north of the channel, their snowfields sitting like cloaks drawn tight around the necks of ice carved granite peaks.
Our first night's anchorage in the Beagle may well be the most spectacular anchorage we have ever seen. Just beyond Isla Diablo off Punta Divide, Caleta Olla lies under a sheer cliff below the 6,500 foot high Pico Frances. While this and the highest peak along the channel, Monte Darwin (8,000 feet high), and their associated snowfields had been visible almost from Puerto Williams, we had still caught little more than glimpses of the ice rivers below them. But as we came around the island and our anchorage opened up in front of us, the shoulder of the mountain that had been hiding the glacier from our view also slid aside. Ventisquero Hollandia, the Holland Glacier, appeared all at once with Pico Frances high above.
Lacy clouds spread delicate tendrils across the cutoff face of the cleaved peak rising from the shadowless snowfields, and the low-angled rays of the sun revealed a range of orange and red highlights within the sheer face of gray rock. The pristine white snow covered the steep slopes below the peak, running down for several thousand feet to the altitude where the Nothofagus beech forest began, punctuated by other, lower crags and shoulders. The broad band of trees ended at a sheer cliff that formed the back of the harbor we were entering. The snowfield split above the trees, running off to the west out of sight over a high ridge. To the east, it turned to glacier ice, and swept down around the edge of the forest and the cliff below along a ravine running some miles behind the cliff face. A broad curve of white snow and green or blue ice, it had cut its way down that ravine, carving a path through the forest, rising to a height well above tree level, leaving broken trees along its edge that looked no larger than matchsticks. One final twist at the bottom of the ravine, and it spilled around the edge of the cliff and expired at sea level, a mile or two from the shore of the bay we were entering. In its dying, it had created a marshy estuary with its terminal moraine, and we could look up that to the base of the glacier as we passed into the anchorage.
After anchoring in a sheltered cove just out of sight of the glacier that night, we started down "glacier alley" the next day. The next glacier, Italia, proved to be the most spectacular in the area. This came down a very steep slope between two massifs, and could be glimpsed as a raised bridge of ice and snow over the shoulder of the ridge as we approached. But only when in front of it could we see its entire expanse, as it came straight down from the towering snowfields above in one broad cascade of giant steps where the frozen ice had sheered and slipped under its weight and the pull of gravity. On the exposed ice faces, the sun flashed off translucent blue highlights, winking and shimmering like a mirage. This glacier ended as a sheer ice face hundreds of feet high no more than fifty feet from the main channel, but separated from us by a boulder-strewn moraine. The scale was almost impossible to absorb as we were looking at a frozen river falling at a thirty- or forty-degree angle straight down the west face of Pico Frances from a height of at least 4,000 feet. A few icebergs floated at the base, trapped by the shallow moraine the retreating ice wall had left in its wake.
Though the sailing has proven challenging and handling shorelines with two people continues to be a learning experience, this area has already proven to be everything we had hoped for and dreamed of when we started building Hawk seven years ago.
Here's to dreams come true!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk