Blue Horizons by Beth A. Leonard

Author:Beth A. Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2007-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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44° 28′ S, 73° 38′ W

Isla Filomena

Canal Moraleda, Chile

March 18, 2002

EVANS licks the last of the chocolate cake batter from the serving spoon and puts the spoon back into the bowl. “When was the last time we lazed on deck in T-shirts?” he asks.

I drop down next to where he is sitting on the coach roof, lie back, and close my eyes, luxuriating in the feel of the warm sun kissing my face and caressing my bare arms. My mind searches back over 3,000 miles and five months, to northern Argentina and our final days in the tropics, before I come up with a memory of voluntarily spending time above decks in anything less than three layers of clothes. “Mar del Plata,” I murmur. I roll over and look at him. “I can hardly believe that less than two hundred miles south of here you were wearing your survival suit while we sailed through the brash ice fronting a glacier face.”

Since crossing the Golfo de Penas at 47° S three days ago, we have entered a whole different world. Golfo de Penas, or Gulf of Pain, represents a major milestone for those cruising Chile’s archipelago—the only place where yachts must leave the shelter of the channels to brave the Roaring Forties on a dangerous and shoal lee shore. But it also represents a major transition in climate and geography.

When we sailed out Canal Messier and entered the Golfo de Penas, we left behind the tortured, bonsai-like trees clinging to the bases of rain-scoured, wind-ravaged mountains and the katabatic winds blasting across anchorages and raising mini-waterspouts. We entered Bahia Anna Pink, just north of 46° S, to find lower, rounder islands, their silhouettes softened by forests of tall, straight beech and conifers that afford real protection from stronger winds. In the last few days, we have sailed past the occasional field or grassy area and working and abandoned fishing camps—a surprise after the many months spent in a raw, brutal, virtually uninhabited land. The barometer rocketed above 1012 millibars for the first time in several months, and sunshine and warm weather have replaced the torrential rain two days out of three and the gale- to storm-force winds once or twice a week that we grew used to farther south. The wind, which blew anywhere from 30 degrees apparent forward for all but two days out of two months south of the Golfo de Penas, shifted aft when we came into Bahia Anna Pink. Instead of motor sailing, we have been able to sail every one of the last three days. It’s as if, in a 120-mile overnight passage, we left the Chilean channels far behind and were somehow transported to the gentle landscapes and temperate weather of southern Ireland or Nova Scotia.

“You know what I like?” Evans asks as he stretches out on the deck beside me. “Just dropping an anchor and not taking an hour and a half to put shore lines out. I never appreciated how simple and easy that was before this.

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