6/3/08 12 Noon

Gabriele, Nik and Steve went ashore this morning to try at hike up a big hill to get a shot of the boat at anchor.  I stayed aboard and sorted out the last blog entry.  They were defeated by the terrain and didn’t get the shot.  We motored further up the finger to get a closer look at the glacier and they took some shots of the boat and glacier together. When we turned to leave, the dolphin escort came back on duty and led us all the way back to the main channel while leaping very high out of the water. I find this particularly touching.

It’s gone grey and horrible again.  25/30 knots on the nose and visibility down to a few hundred yards.

14:30

We emerge from our private fog bank and the viz improves.  Then the wind on the nose ratchets up to Force 8 gusting well over 40 knots.  This slows us down a bit but doesn’t stop us as there is no accompanying sea with this wind.  How they ever managed to get the square riggers up this channel is a mystery. The rain subsides and there are even patches of blue sky.  We pass another control station and the duty officer seems desperate to chat.  This is a truly desolate place and his little hut can only be reached by sea and that only on a good day.

One of the last jobs in Ushuaia was to re-waterproof the spray hood and it seems to be a 95% improvement.   The electronic chart for this area is truly hopeless.  I will include a copy of the chart window.  You can see our intended track relative to the chart and our actual track (the red line) which shows us anchored by the glacier on land and driving straight through several islands.  The chart scale is 1:250,000 and what you see is all the detail there is. Soon we will be on a much better chart section (1: 100,000) with much more detail and the GPS waypoints look to be nearly correct relative to the chart.  We have borrowed a complete book of all the Chilean Charts, reduced to A3 in scale so they can only be read with a magnifying glass, but they are extremely handy when we come across a dodgy looking area with little or no detail on the electronic charts

18:00  Caletón Silva, Puerto Engano, Isla Londonderry

The Force 8 carried on all afternoon. As soon as we entered this little bay the wind dropped to 15 knots and we set the tandem anchors in ten meters depth. The waters open up on the approach here and there was a bit of sea.  Tomorrow will be interesting. .   I also enclose a screen showing where the chart gets better.  We are actually anchored virtually where the boat symbol is.

20:00

We all went for a hike.   Nothing like walking in mushy mossy muddy sodden terrain up steep hills to realize just how out of shape I am.  It’s like walking on sponge; this moss is everywhere.  This place is beautiful is a simpler way than the last stop by the glacier but very welcome.

Tomorrow’s leg is 54 miles.  We’re going to leave at 6AM as the first 30 miles are in pretty open water and as the wind gets worse midday I want to try to get across to more sheltered waters before it gets nasty.