A trip round the Horn to get ‘That’ Photo by Spike
Beneath…..
I have to tell you that Deca-plegia just sucks for a crab.
This place, Patagonia, of course can be paradise. There you are, 30 fathoms down somewhat south of the 55th parallel’ and so far life has been good. Food is easy to come by in these cold waters, friends, mates and the resultant offspring come and go. Yes, prime of crustacean life has arrived. Funny how these Chilean Chaps up top seem to think a crab pot is hard to access – you just crawl in, eat well and crawl out again. The trouble is that us crabs just don’t appreciate the law of averages which states (well, as applicable to Crabs anyway) that sooner or later the crab fishing boat will turn up and haul up the pot with you inside it, even if you yourself have barely passed your hors d’oeuvre.
Above…..
Up top Spike had arrived at a milestone. The big ‘five oh’ had come along and failing youth demanded some demonstration of continuing vitality and sailing round Cape Horn had been selected as a suitable exercise. Lacking motivation, resources, and a tank of a boat to do it in personally a share in a charter of the 55 ft Aluminium Chuck Payne designed ‘Seal’ ran by Hamish and Kate Laird was selected as a means to an end.
Strategic Long Term Forward planning is for Spike to be a quite intolerable grumpy old man with disgusting personal habits by the time the nursing home call has arrived and the ‘Rounding the Horn’ photo on the wall will send its own powerful message out to the staff: That old grey shell receiving a bed-bath once sailed a wee boat round the Great Cape so careful with the soap!
The start of the programme for a photo shoot round Cape Horn goes like this:
>Get yourself to Ushuaia in Argentina without losing luggage (failed)
>Buy replacement stuff
>Find the yacht ‘Seal’ at AFASYN dock in Ushuaia
>Hold your negotiating position with other charterers that as dreadful as weather may seem, and as attractive as glaciers/plants/hikes in Canal Beagle may appear, super hero photo at Cape Horn is essential (success!)
>Check out of Argentina and into Chile which is just across the strait but requiring extraordinary quantities of paper. Discover Pisco Sours and get very drunk in Puerto Williams (more success!)
>Nice Chileans give you a ‘Zarpe’ which appears to tell you where to be, when to be there and requires you to talk to them umpteen times a day. Zarpe says ‘go to Bahia Nassau passing to the east of Isla Navarino’ so not wanting to be sunk by the Armada that is what you do.
>Get weather fax that looks like a Zebra’s bottom
>Wait, and wait, and then wait again. The chosen waiting room was the anchorage on the East side of Isla Lennox.
Now bartering is alive and well at Isla Lennox, a Chilean naval outpost guards the island from those who would take it away from the regime of the disappeared and in the bay half a dozen fishing boats swung at their moorings full of crabs since the buying-boat had not come. For the fishing crews currency meant relatively little anyway – there was nothing to spend it on and nowhere to carry out that pointless exercise and so a deal proposing vegetables and wine in exchange for a dust-bin portion of Centollón crabs needed no protracted negotiation.
Squeamish readers may consider jumping the next bit and going straight to SV Seal’s winning entry to the fraudulent crème brulé competition a few paragraphs down, but for the stronger-stomached reader….
In these enlightened PC days disability is regarded obliquely – from the side – with references to ‘X’ challenged where ‘X’ is replaced by the function of the afflicted part. Death of a Centollón is difficult to address in such enlightened terms. The pot not being dust-bin sized and clearly not large enough to take the whole crab required that the crab had to be decimated instead. Edible legs had to be separated from none-too-tasty- but nevertheless- important- for- more- basic-crab- life function carpace which is then thrown back in to the sea.
So yes….Deca Plegia sucks.
However, washed down with Argentinian Malbec the spider crabs’ appendages were superb.
Not to be out-done at this point Kate, our chef-du-galley swept out a large dish while skipper Hamish brandished a blowtorch which normally carried out diesel heating stove lighting duties. The simple melting of brown sugar over Kate’s plain vanilla pudding created a wonderful faux Crème Brulé the ‘faux’ shimmering into insignificance with increasing Malbec consumption. The Great Cape could wait until tomorrow.
Brooding Monster
The next day dawned with a weird sky- we were between the striped-horse buttocks now and had about 15 hours to make a dash for the Cape and back to shelter. The route would take us from Isla Lennox, across the Bahia Nassau leaving Hall Island to port, the Cape to port and then back across the strait to a refuge on the north-east side of Lennox. There was a certain amount of trepidation as we headed across Nassau – in many ways this place ranks as my scariest place on terra firma (or terra un-firma since we were definitely in the wet element) – and after the winds we had experienced for the last few days the calm now was eerie and definitely had the ‘eye of the storm’ feeling to it. After about 25 miles we entered the archipelago, passing islands named to curry the favour of past Royal Society members such as Woolaston, Herschel and Bayly. The wind picked up – so I was not to be disappointed by seeing the sleeping monster entirely asleep. Hall Island to port and then a dim outline, familiar even from its north west aspect, as Isla Hornos came into view.
In 1578 Drake passed through Magellan’s Strait as part of his voyage around the globe but as he exited the western end he encountered a storm which blew him far to the south, discovering in the process that there was clear water to the south of Tierra del Fuego and finding the Strait that now bears his name. In 1616 two Dutchmen – Shouten and Le Maire backed by merchants from the dutch city of Hoorn passed between Staten Island (another dutch name) and coast of Tierra del Fuego and saw high land to the south which they identified as the end of the continent before Drake’s Passage. They named it for their home city of Hoorn.
As we continued past the Cape the cameras clicked and I got that photo which assures me of special bed-bath attention in the years to come.
Too rough to land at the navy watch post and I was glad of that. To land on this formidable piece of land would take away much of its mystique for me, I wanted to look at it in awe and think of the seamen’s bones beneath Seal’s hull, not walk up to the light house and buy a postcard.
Back across Nasau with a rising wind and into an anchorage open to the East but sheltered from the North and West by Isla Lennox. I had done what I had come here to do, the others had all come here to see the Beagle but I only had a vague idea of the absolute beauty of what was to come.
We were at Lennox again for two nights waiting for the second Zebra buttock to pass over the top of us. The bay we were in provided no easy landing and the enforced cabin time was spent learning a little more about Darwin, Fitzroy and their time here in the channel which bears the name of their ship.
There are none left from the race of Indians who met Beagle in their canoes. A people who lived naked on the tortuous shoreline of the archipelago. Western man, in the person of Fitzroy and others, decided that they needed to be civilized which in Captain Fitzroy’s mind meant Christianised and for that purpose resources had to be found supported by the Christian act of kidnapping four of them and taking them to the other side of the world to be ‘shown’.
Jemmy Button was one of the first four taken, clothed, educated, presented at court and then returned in the second voyage to bring the light to his kin. A few months after being returned to the Yamana Indians Darwin was appalled to see how Jemmy had reverted to the ways of his native countrymen and resisted the idea of returning to England. Twenty years later, Button – who had taught his children English – led the charge that massacred every white man that could be found at Wulaia Bay.
Maybe Fitzroy had succeeded after all: his civilisation process had taught Jemmy to hate.
Now the Yamana have gone, not even remembered in their place names as their language proved so intractable to Europeans and their lands were re-named for the benefit of winning favours of sponsors of western voyages of discovery. All that is left are middens – mounds of shells from edible crustaceans on the beach. So Christian man wiped out the Yamana with his civilization and disease.
Fitzroy on the other hand carried his own nemesis with him on the Beagle. Darwin, chosen for his attributes of being an entertaining companion, looked at the world he saw over the taff rail in a new way and asked how the diversity he saw came to be and in consequence crushed the very fundamentals of Fitzroy’s faith. Thirty years later Fitzroy, blaming himself for the downfall of simple christian belief in the creation, stood before his bathroom mirror and drew a razor across his neck.
Canal Beagle is very much now as Darwin saw it – minus the indians of course. Now Argentina and Chile glare at each other across the water following the territorial dispute which took them to the brink of war in 1978. Thankfully it never turned into a shooting war but still they snipe at each other across the water. In Puerto Williams on the Chilean side of the channel I was astounded at night to look out towards Argentina and see street lights. There is no town, no village, no road. Only street lights. Lights put up by the Argentines to advertise to the cruise-ship passengers that their infra-structure was all embracing, and to niggle the Chileans as well of course.
We were at Puerto Williams because to go anywhere in Chile you need a cruising permit – a ‘zarpe’ – and to get that you need to go to the armada and the armada are at Puerto Williams. In fact the armada ARE Puerto Williams, and very neat and spruce they are too. Berthing is relatively easy in Puerto Williams: go in, find an old sunken ship called the Micalvi and tie up next to it. Staying berthed is not so easy with furious williwaws roaring down from the hills with such a force that they threaten to pull the cleats from your deck. High above the Micalvi are the jagged peaks of ‘The Teeth of Navarino Island’ with a Chilean flag flogging itself to pieces on one of the foothills known as the hill of the Bandera. Now the national flag is a thing to be respected, so pity the official who must climb the hill each evening so that Chile’s glory is fresh and un-ragged for the morning.
Not such a long climb away I came across a well respected white memorial – complete with flag and gun – looking at who the gent was I was staggered to come face-to-face with the 10th Earl of Dundonald. After Lord Cochrane had been thrown out of the navy following a stock exchange fraud scandal he went to south america and founded the Chilean Armada. In Scotland we only vaguely know who Cochrane was because there are pubs named for him, in Chile he is a respected father of the country.
From Puerto Williams we headed East, passing Ushuaia on Malvinas day with impressive fly-pasts for the presidential visit to the memorial to Argentina’s dead on what Reagan had described as those ‘ice-cold ity-bity pieces of land down there’. Passions still run high in Argentina over the Malvinas and Ushuaia’s airport is called the Malvinas which makes for a heart-stopping moment when you get off the plane expecting to see Ushuaia as the name .
Wonderland
And so into a wonderland that I have never anticipated. Ghosting through very shallow waters over submerged terminal moraine at the entrance to the fjord for the Romansche Glacier with gratitude to our swing keel and rudder.
Past sea lions and white breasted cormorants so close on massive moraine boulders that you could reach out and touch them – apparently unconcerned as if they had not seen mankind since his expulsion from Eden.
A sea which suddenly turns to milk with the melt-water solids brought down by waterfalls from the glacier’s nose. Then on to Seno Pia, nudging past brash and bergy-bits and right up to the floating glacier. The ice an impossible blue like the raw material for some kid’s slush puppy. Ice falls crashing into the sea and sending mini-tsunamis across the bay and forcing our retreat. Anchorage in Beaulieu with views so spectacular of Mount Darwin and the glaciers that words are inadequate.
Apparently in the 1920’s polish Jews popularised the phrase ‘Go South Young Man’ to persuade their sons to emigrate to Brazil. The southern canals are wonderful – heed the advice and Go.
Spike
Bio
Mark Holbrook….known as ‘Spike’
Like everybody else I sailed up the Guadiana on a boat about 15 years ago and got stuck. It is not for nothing that the Guadiana is known as ‘Port Velcro’. Now, together with my partner Kari I live in Alcoutim and have a finca on the other side of the river downstream from Sanlucar de Guadiana. My next birthday will be the big one that has ‘7’ in it so I am well retired now but in the past I was a scientific instrument maker in Scotland near Glasgow. I have been married (several times), divorced (also several times) and have two daughters who get on with their lives and ignore mine.
I am pretty keenly into hobbies which come and go frequently and currently include Ham Radio, Astrophotography, Photography of everything else and riding my Italian motorcycles much too fast.