by David Yeadon
My past sailing experience has done little to endear me to the practice. Back in my days as a city planner in Los Angeles I had once been invited by a more affluent colleague to join him for days on the ocean out of the Santa Monica marina. He was a tall, trim individual from an “old money” family whose ability to breeze through life and work in our office always amazed me. I even think I was envious. Prior to any meeting or major presentation I’d be sweating the details in my cubicle, checking the plans and schedules, rehearsing recitations of data and strategies, yellow-marking key phrases and buzzwords in my notes, and caffeining myself up to knife-blade sharpness.
John, on the other hand, would be bumbling along the highway somewhere in his souped up MGTC sports car, top down, music on, his tan deepening in the bright sun and sea air, always an hour or two late for work and barely aware that he had a job to go to at all. Little pink message slips would pile up on his desk (which was always empty—mine invariably looked like a garbage dump). And when he finally arrived, glowing with health and newly bronzed skin, he’d find a way to waste the last hour or so before lunch chatting with the secretaries and telling a few ribald tales to the technicians and draftsmen in the office, who were always eager for distraction and a good morning belly laugh.
“Just wing it,” he told me once before a particularly daunting presentation to a client known euphemistically to be “difficult” and a real “nitpicker.” “You know the stuff—don’t sweat it,” John told me. “Just get up and give ’em a smile and let it rip. If you don’t know the answers, wing those too. Most of the time they don’t know the difference. It’s all in the attitude!”
And he lived up to his philosophy. Five minutes skimming through a day’s worth of heavy technical treatises was all he needed and he was off to his meetings, shaking hands, patting shoulders, rattling off his spiel like a Baptist preacher, full of conviction and confidence, seducing his clients with brilliant word-pictures and leaving them breathless and begging for more.
Yes, I did envy him and I never learned his apparently easy knack of “winging it.”
But (and here comes the rub) on his boat he became a different kind of character altogether. Talk about chameleon psyches. There was no “winging it” whatsoever on the burnished teak deck or around the overpolished brass sailing gear or even in the galley, where every item had a carefully defined place and lord protect the guest who forgot that. He was a tyrant indeed on his beloved Evangeline. He strutted about like a Captain Bligh shouting out orders to his “crew” (usually inexperienced colleagues who he’d lured to his boat by promises of easy days out on the ocean—with girls), complaining of lines not properly laid, greasy fingerprints on his brass fixtures, and sails sloppily raised.
A day at sea for John was like a campaign of war—exactingly planned, executed to the smallest detail, and with names taken of any errant crewperson who mistakenly thought he or she had come along for a little pleasure and play. There was hardly a moment of rest on John’s cruises. Even when the wind died and we’d float in the calm seas, ideal for a bit of splash ’n’ frolic, he’d seek out the faintest of breezes and have us all hauling and lowering sails, just to keep us moving, no matter how slowly, through the doldrums.
And when we returned to dock, worn and washed out, there’d be no escaping the boat until everything was packed, rolled, tied, repolished, and shipshaped to pass his exacting inspection.
Needless to say, I didn’t sail too often with John.
So why am I here with Peter? I kept wondering. Although I felt far more confidence with this stranger than I’d ever felt before in a boat, our journey through the treacherous channels was testing us both to the limit. And his craft too. I wondered how much more it could take before the gear broke or something snapped and the sails were ripped to shreds and we’d be left floating helplessly, waiting for the sea to smash us against the cliffs of one of those fogbound little islands or against the black shore of the fjords.
But then came miracle-time. The wind suddenly dropped. The seas eased down to a choppy roll, and the mists began to lift up from the fjords like the rising of a stage curtain on some magnificent set for Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Layer by layer the hills slowly rose from the shadows. Sea-level forests, rising higher to brittle-edged ridges and arêtes, higher and higher through sun-splashed snowfields, up past the gleaming blue-gold glaciers, to the sparkling peaks and domes of the Andes themselves.
The boat was barely moving now and we stood together, mouths open, as the scene emerged and the mists evaporated, leaving little serpentine strands floating in the high dark clefts.
“Unbelievable,” I said (or some equally inadequate expression of wonder).
Peter didn’t speak at all but opened a couple of beers and handed one to me. It was then I realized we’d hardly eaten or drunk anything in the last twenty-four hours. The storm and our concern for the boat had removed both appetite and thirst. Now I felt ravenous.
“Where’s the canned tuna? I’m starving,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Peter. “Time for celebration.”
And so we celebrated as the grandeur of the fjords continued to expand in all directions. Even the dumpy islands behind us, wet, mossbound, and uninhabited, took on a more appealing appearance as the sun splashed them with dapples of light.
This is what I’d come looking for—the magnificent loneliness and majesty of this remote place where no one lives and only the birds and the dolphins and the small creatures of the rain forests are companions.
And, as if on cue, we spotted three different species of albatross (the royal, sooty, and brown) circling us, followed minutes later by half a dozen shiny-skinned dolphins, who paused in their rolling ride north to put on a display of somersaults and leaps and birdlike calls especially for us.
“They used to give special decorations to sailors who crossed this Gulf of Penas in wintertime,” Peter told me.
“Who was Penas? Some explorer?” I asked
“No, no. It’s Spanish for ‘tribulation.’ Maybe ‘misery’ is more accurate.”
“Very accurate.”
Way, way to the north behind us we could see the faint outline of the Taitao Peninsula and the entrance to the more sheltered channels that had carried us south from Puerto Montt.
And then we saw the glacier.
We’d noticed it marked on the map in the northeast corner of the gulf, but Peter had decided the weather was too bad to go looking for it. But now with sunlight bathing the whole mountainbound bay we could afford to dally awhile.
And thank God we did. What we saw and experienced in the next day or so made the whole journey worthwhile.
As we edged in closer to Lake San Rafael we watched as the great San Rafael glacier, a ten-mile-long, one-and-a-half-mile-wide river of ice, soared higher and higher in front of us. Thousands of feet above were the shattered peaks of 13,310-foot Mount San Valentine and a string of lesser mountains cloaked in snow and ice fields.
We met our first ice floes, heading out to the gulf, followed by icebergs of increasing size.
“She’s calving,” said Peter.
“What?”
“The glacier’s calving. The ice walls are cracking. She’s breeding baby icebergs—calves.”
Soon we had to start edging our way cautiously between the “calves.” Many of them had large horizontal shelves of ice under the surface and they could be hazardous even for small shallow-draft craft like ours. There were lots of them now, some less than twenty feet high and still showing the fracture marks where they’d broken from the mother glacier. Others towered above us in the still, mirrored water, more than a hundred feet high, bright white on the outside but with blue cracks and fissures, the blueness deepening with their depth. At one point we were surrounded by these enormous creatures, unable to see the mountains or the forest-covered shores. A lost world in miniature, bound by soaring carved walls and towers and broken jagged peaks of crystal ice, always moving in relation to each other, creating n
ew patterns, revealing new silhouettes, rounding in on us, then offering us narrow channels of escape between walls of turquoise and royal blue ice.
And all in total silence. For some reason I’d expected groans and cracks and creaks (memories of books on Arctic expeditions when the ice always seemed to be alive?), but beyond the slight hum of our diesel engine these enormous edifices, rounded in places like great Henry Moore sculptures, others roughly hewn, Rodin-style, moved past us with no noise whatsoever.
Crack!
Followed by a tearing roar and then the echo of a huge splash.
We rounded the delicately shaped edge of an iceberg and saw the ice wall of the glacier immediately in front of us, hardly more than a mile away. All two hundred vertical feet of her. Torn, broken, and bruised-blue up her vertical face, then gold-flecked white on top where the sun sparkled on her broken surface.
We had just missed a “calving.” An avalanche of ice shards followed the collapse of a hundred-foot tower of ice into the ocean and a small tidal wave was heading our way, bouncing the icebergs like galleons in its path. Fortunately, its ten-foot-high cresting wave diminished to a rolling ripple by the time it hit our boat, but Peter was cautious. “I think that’s far enough. If we move too close we’ll be swamped.”
I was disappointed. I wanted to ride right up to her slowly collapsing face, see the towers topple, feel the crash when they hit the ocean, be bounced by the tidal waves.
But Peter was the captain and I a very subsidiary deckhand. So I watched with him from a safe distance as the glacier cracked like cannon shot and towers toppled and new icebergs arose, at first shakily from the ocean, then, having found their balance, holding themselves in a haughty manner, waiting to be carried slowly by the water out into the gulf.
We spent hours floating there as the breezeless afternoon eased on and the colors began to deepen on the mountains across the lake. Finally we decided it was just too beautiful to leave and sailed to the northern shore, well away from the floating ice, and found a cove bound by blankets of thick moss for the night.
And as the sunset waned, bathing the glacier, the icebergs, and the towering peaks in a golden-pink light, we watched for the moon and, much later, tried to identify all those new and very unfamiliar star patternings and constellations. If only the sky would stay clear and open for the next few days we’d have the sail of a lifetime down through the mysterious uninhabited channels to the south, down the notorious Strait of Magellan, all the way to the rowdy urban distractions of Punta Arenas, six hundred miles to the south of the Gulf of Penas.
But luck only gives of itself sparingly here.
When we climbed on deck the following morning at five A.M. everything was cold and damp and gray.
“Bloody fog again!” said Peter.
“It’ll lift!” I said in what I hoped was a cheerful voice.
“It’d better bloody lift. We can’t move until it does. It’d be suicide with all those ’bergs floating about. We’d never make it back to the gulf.”
After an hour or so the fog thinned enough for us to raise anchor and ease slowly down the northern shore of Lake San Rafael. We spotted a couple of monster icebergs to the south and a few smaller floes, but they were well away from us and after a couple of hours we were back in the ocean again.
Peter was still not happy.
“I’m not sure we should have left, y’know.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“The wind’s coming in from an odd angle. The sea’s got a pull to it. I don’t know. Something just feels odd. Might be nothing….”
It was rare for Peter to share his uncertainties like this. Usually he’d wait until his suspicions had been confirmed and then describe the accuracy of his silent predictions with the cocky confidence of a soothsayer.
For the first few hours it appeared his fears were unjustified. We sailed south in a light breeze as the fog and morning mists continued to clear, revealing once again the grandeur of this fjord coast. The soaring Andean ridges appeared again; sunlight gilded the snowfields and glaciers, and the lower rain-forested slopes looked so inviting that I wanted to leave the boat for a while and go off romping among the tangled vegetation, discovering the cool shady mysteries of their depths.
But I knew Peter was anxious to get farther south, away from the treacherous currents and fickle storms of the gulf and down into the naturally formed canals between the fjords and the Pacific islands, down the Mesier, Inocentes and Smyth channels, past the Archipiélago de la Reina Adelaida, and on into the Strait of Magellan.
So I became content just to watch the mountains and the deep shadowy cliffs of the fjords and the shimmering waterfalls that plunged in steps, thousands of feet down from the ice caps to the forests and the roiling ocean.
And the albatrosses. How I loved their flight, stretching their great six-foot wingspans and skimming only inches above the water, rarely flapping, allowing the air to cushion them effortlessly. The slightest adjustment to their wing profiles enabled them to soar gracefully or turn slowly to follow us, watching us with indifference in their dark eyes.
Closer into shore were the steamer ducks with their bright lemon-orange bills, floating in small clusters of a dozen or so and then vanishing together in unison below the waves, where they propelled themselves with their stubby wings as rapidly as cormorants. When it comes to flying, though, they’re useless creatures. Their wings don’t seem designed for liftoff and when alarmed they flail away at the water and vanish in rainbowing sprays, half running, half kayaking across the waves.
On the rocky shoals close to shore I spotted seals, scores of them, basking in the brilliant morning sun. In such a desolate setting, two hundred miles now from the nearest village or fishing camp, it was reassuring to see such amiable creatures who seemed curious about, but in no way alarmed by, our intrusion into their secret world.
As the day slowly eased into late afternoon, Peter decided we should put in early so he could perform some technical tasks on our battered craft. He selected as our anchorage a calm broad fjord, edged by dense rain forest, and was soon working away at the steering gear again.
“Sure you don’t need any help?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.
He said no and suggested I might want to go ashore for a while.
“Bring back some mussels if you find any. They’re supposed to be the best in the world.”
We were anchored only fifty feet offshore, so I jumped into the water….
I’d never thought the ocean could be so cold. Somehow, as we’d battered the tempests over the past few days, the waves that soaked us had always remained on the tepid side. But this particular cove contained water on the verge of turning into ice. By the time I struggled over the slippery rocks and onto the shore, I was blotched blue and shivering, my teeth chattering like a woodchuck. I started flailing my arms about to jump-start the blood circulation and promptly collapsed on the pebbly beach. I stood up again and found I had almost no sense of balance. My body had become so used to being bounced around on the always-moving deck of the boat that it had apparently forgotten how to deal with the solidity and stability of terra firma.
For a while movement was limited to crashing around on all fours. I could hear Peter laughing back on the boat.
“What are you, some kind of bloody bear?” he shouted.
All I could manage was a distinctly explicit finger gesture as I wobbled about trying to find some way to stand on my feet for a few seconds.
“Just sit down for a while—you’ll be okay in a while,” he bawled, still laughing.
Peter’s advice was sound, but I could do without all the levity at my expense.
I decided to rest and enjoy the scene.
Late afternoon shadows were moving into the fjord—the ice-capped ridges thousands of feet above me were turning a burnished gold, edged with pink. A short distance from the rocky beach strewn with driftwood were enormous mounds of moss, like rich green lava. Beyond I could see patches o
f brilliantly colored wildflowers, none of which I could recognize from this distance—orange, vermilion, turquoise, crimson, and white. And behind these, the shaggy, moss-coated mass of stubby trees rising from a tangle of roots to a height of twenty feet or so. It was at once tempting and eerie. The openings between ferns and dead tree trunks and twisted branches beckoned, but the sinister gloom beyond made me hesitate. It was so black in there. No light seemed to penetrate the thick green canopy overhead. But c’mon, I told myself, you’re perfectly safe. The boat’s only a few yards offshore. All you’ve got to do is get across the mossy fringes here and you’ll be able to see how safe it really is.
Two emerald hummingbirds flashed by, hovered for a while over tiny flowers in the moss, and vanished. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of hare-sized pudu—the world’s tiniest deer—which I’d read was a resident of these moist forested places. And maybe a guanaco, cousin to the llama, although I associated these creatures with higher, drier Andean mountainsides.
Okay, up and off. My balance seemed to be recovering. I was ready to explore the forest.
Only it wasn’t that easy. The maze of mossy mounds into which I stepped were not mere coverings of piled rocks and boulders as I’d thought, but enormous independent entities, three or four feet deep, and covering the thickest, blackest, stickiest goo that it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. Far worse than the peat bogs in Scotland, which at least gave off a pleasing earthy aroma when punctured by boots, this stuff reeked of dead fish and rotting matter, eons old. And the more I struggled forward, the deeper and smellier it got. I was soon up to my thighs in the mess. As I tried to press down with my arms to move forward, they too sank beyond the elbows and were difficult to extract. The moss seemed to suck them in and if I moved too quickly my whole body sank deeper. I could feel no rock base under the moss; it was obviously a much thicker covering than I’d thought and I gave up all attempts at trying to move any farther through it. The primary challenge now was to get back to where I’d begun at the pebble beach, and the only way to do that was to literally lie on the stuff and pull myself across its gelatinous surface using hunks of the green and ocher-colored moss as handholds.