Spring Moon of the Southern Cross
54 degrees 54 minutes S 68 degrees 32 minutes W heading 077 NEE
We left Punta Arenas at 8 pm yesterday in the bright sun of late afternoon. The crew had moored us to four floating buoys as well as capstans on the pier. Watching them unburden the ship of its ties to land became interesting as the wind picked up to 60 kph gusts, pressing the bulk of the Veendam against the ropes tethering it and tightening them. The crew created slack on the buoy ropes while a Punta Arenas tug, Atlas, scuttled over to it, backed up and unburdened itself of two crew who hopped on the buoy and lifted the great hawsers free. The Veendam sucked them back up through the water.
As night fell, we sailed south through the Magellan Strait, then into the Cockburn Channel. In the night we entered the channel named after Darwin’s famous voyage, Beagle Channel.
When we got up, snow covered sharp mountain faces behind sloped and green rock with trees. As we went up to the Lido Deck for breakfast, I noticed a glacier coming up on the port side. I moved onto deck 12, then sky deck, a flat circular deck that marks the highest point passengers can go on the Veendam. It offers a platform for taking in scenery on both sides and in front of the ship and therefore is ideal for photography.
Four huge glaciers appeared over the next 40 minutes, somewhat evenly spaced apart. Rivers of ice. Even after the Amalia glacier, this phrase did not come to mind. Until. These. Now the blue ice runs, courses, screams out of the mountains, pushing, out of my way rock I’m moving on, as it heads for the salty waters of the Beagle.
Four of them, in a row, magnificent, wonders of the natural world. These are world shapers, lake makers, river cutters, earth movers, boulder scatterers. The essence of a stream is to flow, of a mountain, mass, of ocean, to fill, of land, to separate, of a glacier, to create. These are ur-entities, those who come before others and their quiet presence belies their power. Glaciers are the strong, silent type writ large.
In all the sailing we’ve done through the Chilean fjords we’ve done I’ve seen only one house. I have a picture of it. It is the most splendidly isolated structure I have ever seen. The only way to get to it is by boat or ship and the closet inhabited area is hours away. A great place to write.
In Ushuaia, our next port, the Museum at the End of the World graces one end of the road that fronts the ocean. It’s an apt name, for this is the largest community of the far southern end of the Americas. There a couple of small outposts of civilization otherwise, but this is a functioning community.
The Chilean fjords and the geography of the archipelago surrounding the Beagle channel make it easy to imagine that if this is not the end of the world you can see it from here. And, you can.
It’s a remarkable feeling to be at the bottom of the map, a sort of geographical weightlessness, as if the burden of land has almost been lifted and we could float free, unbound to land anymore.
This afternoon, at 2 pm, we begin to explore the Beagle channel on a smaller boat.
Sunset here is at 9:14 pm. The winds are 39 mph. We 262 nautical miles from Punta Arenas and with 9.5 nautical miles of Ushuaia. The sun rises at 5:23 am.
