Back at the helm - sailing the Yaghan to Antarctica, Patagonia and the South Pacific

by Martensson, Helene

  On Monday December 5 we weighed anchor just after dawn. I made sandwiches and hot chocolate while we were motoring out of Stanley Harbour. We breakfasted in the morning sun, passing the beautiful Gypsy Cove and the coast south of Port Stanley. It was sad to have to leave this place so soon. We realised that Hasse Nilsson had been right; we should have spent several weeks here, not just a few days. Ever since our first few days in Stanley Harbour both Arne and I felt that we would want to return to the Falklands sometime in the future. We talked about it several times on the way to Ushuaia. It was now that our next project began to shape in our minds: sailing from Sweden via Uruguay, the Falklands, Antarctica and South Georgia, stopping off to pay our respects at Shackleton's grave, and returning home via Cape Town and the West Indies. What would life be without dreams!

  We motored for a few hours, and then the wind started blowing. To begin with we had the wind behind us for almost the entire twenty-four hour crossing to Ushuaia, the world's southernmost city, 453 nautical miles or two and a half days from Stanley. We were sailing through the Screaming Fifties, which we could feel with every bone in our bodies. Dolphins, albatrosses and petrels circled around our boat. They followed us faithfully for hour on end until it got dark.

  On the second day the wind and sea increased in force. The wind turned to a south-westerly headwind. During the evening and night it continued to increase and changed to north-westerly, which would involve tacking, but we would get to our destination in a single reach. We had plotted a course south of Staten Island. It was the best option in this wind, even if it meant a counter current of three to 4 knots. The Cape Horn current would slow us down even further as we would be sailing against both the wind and the current.

  As the sun set in the west, both sky and sea looked menacing. The water was completely black and the waves were breaking. The sky was a dark shade of grey, and we saw heavy, black clouds forming ahead of us. We had long suspected – based on the weather scenarios that Arne had simulated for the different legs of the voyage – that this part of our voyage may turn out to be the hardest. Looking around at the sky and sea we knew we were right and that the night we had before us would not be easy. We prepared for the storm we suspected would soon break out. We dressed warmly and put on our boots and hats, we secured the ventilation hatch in the bow, and everything was safely stowed away below and on deck. We had already eaten our evening meal and we were prepared.

  Just knowing that we were less than a hundred nautical miles from Cape Horn rock was enough to make my heart beat a little faster, but now the black, heavy, low clouds, roaring wind and enormous waves frightened me.

  The top wind speed was between 40 and 50 knots, the wide angle about 35 degrees. The rail was in the water, the staysail set and the mainsail was just a tiny triangle. The counter current was nearly 4 knots, but we were still travelling at a speed of 6 or 7 knots. It was completely dark, no stars and no moon, only shades of black sky and the roaring wind. In my experience, you can get used to almost anything, and after a few hours sailing in these conditions it felt noticeably calmer when the wind dropped to just over 30 knots. I thought about rolling out the main a little, but the wind soon picked up again before I had time to do anything about it, and I kept the sails the way they were. I had never before heard the sound that the rigging and hull emitted in the night. It was frightening, because these sounds meant that the strong wind and high seas had a price. We could only hope that no damage would be done.

  During my watch, I suddenly heard how Lennart on Cabo De Hornos, one of the Swedes we had met at Mar del Plata, called a nearby ship on the VHF. Then it went quiet and there were no more communications. I saw no radar echoes and in the dark I was unable to discern any boats nearby. The sea was high as we passed Staten Island and entered Le Maire strait. I realised that the island had provided good shelter earlier, but we were no longer protected by it.

  The wind dropped a little in the morning. When we entered the Beagle Channel we were protected by the waves, but the wind was head on. We reefed and furled all sails, started the engines and motored against the wind towards Ushuaia.

  The Beagle Channel must be one of the most beautiful waterways in the world. Its banks are lined with snow-capped mountains, green valleys and deep inlets. On one side is Argentina, on the other Chile. The knowledge that we were sailing as far south as you can possibly get in Tierra del Fuego was magical. We were no longer tired after sailing throughout the night. We were happy and expectant. At the same time we were grateful that everything had gone well and that nothing had been damaged. The Beagle Channel is long, and when we passed Puerto Williams on our port side there were twenty-nine miles left to Ushuaia. We would later make many visits to Puerto Williams in order to enter Chile.

  We were enormously pleased and elated when the world's southernmost town, Ushuaia, appeared ahead with its snow-clad mountains and peaks. It was one of the most beautiful sights we had ever seen. It was a wild landscape. It is the last outpost before the white continent.

  We had sailed along the entire South-American coast, from Salvador de Bahia in the north to Ushuaia in the south. On the way we had passed Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. We were now in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. We had coped with the hardships of sailing better than we could have hoped for. No damage had been done to the boat, or to us. There was great happiness on board –the kind of joy that is always the greater when fear and anxiety have shown their ugly faces for a moment. As we slowly glided in between the rickety jetties in the AFASYN marina at our destination, Ushuaia, we were happier still as we spotted a small, red steel ketch with the words Northern Light painted on the stern. Deborah Shapiro and Rolf Bjelke were here too!

  Ushuaia – City of Our Hearts

  Ushuaia is beautifully situated at the foot of the Martial range whose snow-capped peaks provide an alpine, wild setting for the town. Walking on the main street, San Martin, it felt as if we had been transported to a small Italian mountain village. Other parts of the town were more like the Wild West.

  We often had a meal of grilled meat at one of the popular grills. And when we drank wine, it was without exception Argentinean Malbec, which we had learned to enjoy in Mar del Plata. Ushuaia is steeped in adventure, ice and cold. All Antarctic cruise liners moor here. The place is full of tourists shopping for warm clothing: the hats, gloves and boots that will protect them from the cold during their visit to the continent of ice. When you have finished your shopping you can visit the trendy bar and café Tante Sara that serves cakes and fillet of beef sandwiches. We often went there for a glass of Malbec wine, usually Terrazas or Latitud 33, and a chat about our imminent crossing to Antarctica. We also replenished our own supply of cold weather gear. We were especially pleased about the big sheepskin-lined boots that we found in a sports outfitters. Sitting outside at night with cold feet is no fun. My boots had room for at least three pairs of woollen socks. They were not easy to walk in, but you do not walk far on our boat. They were the perfect foot wear for night watches in Drake Passage.

  The anxiety and fear that I had felt over the past few years each time I thought about this crossing naturally came back when we reached the last stop but one before setting off. When these thoughts arrived I immediately began to review my supply lists, cooked meals for the freezer or went shopping for supplies at the Anonima supermarket. My worries were channelled into practical work. It was good for me.

  The weather was extremely temperamental. I would be cleaning the boat dressed in jeans and a sweater, but when the wind started reaching 40 knots I had to finish the job dressed in over-trousers, a warm fleece jumper and hat. You could smell the snow, and the mountains behind Ushuaia received a sprinkling of white.

  Stocking up at the Anonima supermarket was neither a positive nor an easy experience. My lists of supplies included two hundred bottles of water, fifty bags of soup, seventy yoghurt cartons, fifty eggs, twenty litres of UHT milk, twenty chicken fillets, three kilos of mincemeat, eleven kilos of f
lour, three kilos of rice and pasta, three kilos each of onions, tomatoes and carrots, ten kilos of potatoes and five kilos of oranges, apples and pears. The staff helped transport my purchases by car. Then I had to shift all the boxes and bags, first onto the rickety jetty by means of a handcart and then below deck. The best part was stowing everything away in suitable places around the boat. I felt like a little squirrel preparing for winter. The supply lists were transformed into inventories that I entered into an Excel sheet on my computer. I needed to know exactly what was in the fridge, larder, the cupboard behind the cooker, under the floor in the galley, in the cupboards behind the settee in the saloon, the one by the radio, under the deck in the aft cabin, etc.

  The days passed rapidly, and on Saturday December 16 we left Ushuaia. The other Scandinavian boats that had arrived from Mar del Plata were still in the marina. They were all planning to spend Christmas there, while we were hoping to celebrate Christmas and the New Year in Antarctica – the enticing and at the same time frightening continent of ice and animals that keeps drawing us closer. We would soon be there, even though the idea seemed unreal to us.

  ≈

  Antarctica

  (Arne)

  Ushuaia – A Meeting Point for Circumnavigators

  We soon established that we would not be following the normal route, via the Panama Canal, on our voyage around the world. We were going to Antarctica and Patagonia. The Antarctic was the absolute highlight of our voyage. It was the leg that we were most looking forward to, but at the same time the one that we were most concerned about. There was a risk that sliding around with the wind behind us in warm climates would get boring, Antarctica was the necessary spicy element of our circumnavigation.

  Very few sailing boats go to the Antarctic. In 2006, thirty-one did, but many of them were chartered from Ushuaia, only sixteen were private. The figure was approximately the same in 2000, so there had been no increase in the past few years. In 1987 eight boats sailed to Antarctica. This is a significant increase over a period of twenty years, even though the figure has remained fairly stable in the 2000s. Only a handful of the boats that do sail there do it as part of a circumnavigation.

  I still remember the taxi driver who drove me to the Swedish Radio in Stockholm for an interview about our circumnavigation. He listened to the live broadcast sitting in his car, which was parked outside. When I came out he said, “That was a nice interview. The only thing I can't understand is why you answered Antarctica to the question about what you were most looking forward to. Such an inhospitable place compared to Polynesia and the other wonderful places in the Pacific that you will be visiting.”

  You could also argue that the trip to Antarctica was the most dangerous part of our voyage. We are not entirely sure. It sometimes feels as if the level of risk is constant, it just changes. In warmer climates there are pirates, muggers and bandits, in cold climates there is the weather. We are somehow more comfortable with risks that are associated with the weather. They are easier to monitor and protect yourself against. It does, however, require that your weather systems are absolutely state of the art, and we made very sure that that was what we were getting. We have never been gamblers.

  We arrived at Ushuaia – the world's southernmost city – on December 7, 2006, from the Falklands. We had expected the crossing from the Falklands to Ushuaia to be one of the hardest of the entire voyage. And so it was. There were very strong winds during the second half as well as counter currents of up to 5 knots. We were going south of Staten Island. Most people choose the northern route in order to avoid the strong Cape Horn current. Because we had a fast boat, we could sail against the counter current in lea of Staten Island. Strong northerly winds prevailed in the area, so the sea would have been rougher north of the island.

  Entering the Beagle Channel and arriving at Ushuaia felt incredible. Twelve years ago I rounded the Horn together with Hasse Olsson, Hannu Olkinuora and Björn Karlin, starting at Ushuaia. These were the first waters I had sailed in after leaving Europe six months earlier. Now I was eager to revisit the town.

  I remembered the landscape around Beagle Channel, especially around Ushuaia, as among the most beautiful I had ever seen. Twelve years ago the town itself was rather dilapidated and there was no proper harbour. When we approached I noticed that the jetty we had moored at before was gone. Instead, we had to moor at AFASYN, a boat club with a jetty about a kilometre out of town. You could not really call it a marina, but there is a jetty that reaches quite a long way out into the water. You moor on both sides and hull to hull. As long as the wind is westerly or southwesterly it is all right, but the few times it is easterly the harbour becomes dangerous and you need to swing anchor further out. We had established that the wind would be westerly for the next few days, and we tried to find a mooring at the jetty. We had soon attached ourselves to one of the steel charter vessels that operate here and in Antarctica. After we had settled down, we noticed that Northern Light was moored right across from us. This was exciting. We had read Rolf and Deborah's books and were looking forward to meeting them in real life.

  There were many boats of different nationalities around the jetty. Ushuaia is truly a meeting place for circumnavigators, and the atmosphere is rather special because of this. There are boats that are en route around the world, but also about ten charter boats, steel sailing boats – many of them French – that bring charter tourists to Patagonia and Antarctica.

  Provisioning took just over a week. We were ready by December 15. We planned on surviving fifty to sixty days without provisioning. In their book Time on Ice, Deborah and Rolf have included an appendix with a list of supplies for two people, which we followed. For example, we bought ten kilos of potatoes and eleven kilos of flour, even if it was hard to get over that we needed to buy so much all at once. We were planning to be back in Ushuaia in the middle of January 2007. According to the weather statistics we had compiled over a period of two years, you may have to wait up to five days in Antarctica before you either dare or can cross Drake Passage again. Becoming stuck at anchor in some bay with icebergs blocking the exit is another risk factor.

  Another item on our agenda was fuelling. The problem here was that many claimed that the diesel sold by the main fuelling quay in town was of poor quality. We do not know if this was true, but the idea of engine failure in Antarctica was not attractive. We decided we wanted to be on the safe side and did the same as everyone else, which meant that ten two hundred litre barrels were delivered on a small truck from a fuel station four kilometres away where they claimed that the diesel had been filtered twice. It took us a full day before we had loaded the 2,000 litres. Even though we had to pay 350 dollars for transport and loading, it was the cheapest diesel we had ever bought. It cost 50 cents per litre. After adding the 350 dollars we arrived at a total cost of about 70 cents per litre. Never before during this trip had we bought fuel cheaper than 85 cents per litre; the price in Stockholm at the time was 1.70. If you do not think too much about it you might think that low diesel prices are a good thing, but as an economist I must say that I find this to be another sign that Argentina is a badly run country. Not only is there no tax on diesel, it seems to be subsidised by the state. Bread too is subsidised in Argentina, the price is an all time low. It costs next to nothing.

  It is a common view that no country should subsidise its main industry since that is what sustains the country and on which its export revenue is based. This is why, for example, the Icelandic fishing industry should not be subsidised while a country like Sweden can do it. Sweden's economy depends on its export industry, but fishing is marginal. It is absurd for an agricultural country such as Argentina to subsidise bread. It is a sign that the country has long been governed by populists who have ruined the country's economy completely; something that is tragic but true. In the fifties people in Argentina enjoyed the same standard of living as people in Sweden, but after many years of bad government Argentina is a poor country compared to Sweden.

 
Regular analyses of countries’ economies are carried out by banks because they are constantly taking financial risks, not only for businesses and private individuals but aso for nations. Many years ago I came across some old analyses for Argentina that showed that in the 1920s, Argentina was destined to become one of the richest countries in the world. It had everything – natural resources, agriculture and a predominantly European population. In 1930, 1940 and 1950, the forecasts were about the same, even though the country did not develop quite as rapidly as the experts had anticipated. After the Second World War, Argentina was beginning to lose ground. The great populist Juan Perón was elected president in 1946, and his party came to dominate the political life for thirty years, even though Juan Péron himself was overthrown in a military coup. After his death in the seventies, his wife Isabel was in power for a few years. Today, Argentina is a poor country despite its natural assets. The reason is its unfailing ability to attract incompetent, populist leaders. At the time of writing, the previous president has been succeeded by his wife …

  I have spent most of my life in banking, and I have learned that intelligence, education, background, etc. are extremely important for a person's success in life. Therefore, the responsibility to help and support people that are less fortunate than others lies with society. Nations, however, is another matter entirely. There is, within all nations, a “normal distribution” of people. It means that all nations stand a chance of succeeding with the right leadership. The existence of natural resources has nothing to do with the level of development. If there had been a connection between them, Argentina would have made it, but not Japan or Hong Kong, countries that lack natural resources completely. It all depends on the quality of state institutions. A good legal system, a functioning financial sector and solid institutions are far more important that mineral-rich soils. If you are able to offer the people of a country the opportunities they need, it will lead to economic development. So, the way a country develops depends entirely on its government. The same goes for local government. When I worked in Swedish banking I was often fascinated by the fact that there were no obvious connections between the “natural preconditions” that the politicians kept talking about and municipal finances. The fact that countries that fail to develop are badly run has made me sceptical of foreign aid – I am talking about development aid, not catastrophe aid offered in connection with disasters. Outside help can never repair the effects of a bad regime. Just look at Tanzania. We went there in 2006 before setting out on our circumnavigation. Sweden has handed out billions in aid since the sixties, and the country has basically not moved on since. The same goes for the whole African continent, except South Africa – only the small country of Botswana may be an exception to this rule. At the end of the 1980s, per capita income was lower than it was when most of the African countries were being decolonised around 1960. National debt increased dramatically, even though Africa received more aid than any other part of the world. This was largely caused by a combination of Socialist one-party systems, persecution of dissidents, corruption and megalomania. No foreign aid in the world can compensate for this. Between 1960 and 1989, only three out of fifty African states held reasonably free public elections. One of them was Botswana – the only success story in Africa. Robert Mugabe – who transformed the once so rich Zimbabwe to one of the poorest countries in the world – was once asked why African countries were so keen to embrace Communism. He replied that it was not so much the Communist ideas that interested them, but the fact that under Communism you never give up the power once you have won it. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became blatantly clear to most people that Communism was a poor road to economic development. But Africa had fallen behind by several decades by then.