Living the Life in Chile

The last six weeks have been absolutely magical.  I’ve had visits from long-lost college buddies, more than my fair share of delicious Chilean food, and some top-notch adventures down in the fjords.  

The Gorski Pichanga Fest
It all started in early June when a friend of mine from college came to visit.  Lauren moved to Utah shortly after I left and I hadn't gotten to see her in years.  She happened to be visiting her sister who was studying abroad up in Santiago and she brought Jessica and another Bucknell alum, Reuben, along for some sight seeing around Puerto Montt.

We had a big dinner on the Rascal the first night and decided to kick the trip off with some land-based travel to the magical island of Chiloe.  We spent the next few days seeing sights, hiking around in the woods, drinking frosty cold Escudos, and learning about the mythical lore of Chiloe.

During our time in Chiloe, we also learned about a glorious Chilean culinary invention that goes by the name of "pichanga".  It's a distant cousin of Canadian Poutine and it all starts with a big bed of french fries.  While recipes vary from establishment to establishment, most are topped with chicken, sausage, steak, cheese, hot dog, hard boiled egg, ham, pickles, avocado, tomatoes, carmelized onion, and olives.  You can imagine our great surprise and delight when the first one showed up at our table, and after sampling a single bite of its decadence, we were hooked.

Given the description above, you're probably thinking, "half of those things don't sound like they go with the other half!" ...and you're absolutely right.  How can you possibly pair a cold tomato with a hot piece of smoked sausage or a pickled onion with a cube of ham?  I found that it was exactly this absurd imbalance that makes pichanga so balanced.  It was the unexpected flavor combinations and changes in texture and temperature that make it such a brilliant and delightful dish. A plate of pichanga is obviously way too big for one person to handle on their own, so it makes a good group meal, with each person picking and choosing their favorites.  Every restaurant has their own take on pichanga and some are much better than others, but I can't say that we ever had a bad pichanga.  In fact, we enjoyed them so much that we managed to eat 3 during 24 hours at one point.  

When we weren't gorging ourselves at Chilote dive bars, we spent some time hiking around in national parks, shopping for warm wool handicrafts, and taking in lakes and volcanos from a distance.  

Sailing around PM 
Eventually the crew had to head back to work and school and I spent a couple of days working on the Rascal and carousing with some Chilean friends around Puerto Montt.  Late one night we were hanging around a marina and a plan hatched to sail the Rascal to a nearby hot spring the next day.  We went to the market the following morning, bought a bunch of wine and a 15lb salmon, and pulled the anchor with a following breeze.

After a couple week hiatus, it felt great to be out sailing again and we soon found ourselves surrounded by whales.  

My friend Jaime is a photographer and he was snapping pictures throughout the sail as we carved our way south.  

Our following breeze slowly turned into a headwind and a contrary current and we had to lay up for the night a couple of miles short of the hot springs.  It was disappointing to come up short, but we were awarded with an excellent consolation prize in the form of delicious Chilean wine and superb scenery all around us.  

We made it to the hot springs early the next day, and though they weren't exactly piping hot, we had a snug little anchorage and we lit a big fire.  The feast we prepared that evening was absolutely glorious - local foraged mushrooms and sunchokes tossed with garlic, shallots, and onions; and fresh caught salmon grilled right over the fire.  Uniquely Chilean and totally delicious.  

It snowed in the high country during the night and a few showers on the sail back made for prime rainbow conditions.  

Fun in the Fjords
I spent the next few days getting reprovisioned in Puerto Montt and then pointed the Rascal southward once again for some more solo exploring in the fjords.  

The idea of this sojourn was to explore all of the fjords and potential skiing-from-the-boat options within spitting distance (ie: 2-3 day sail) from Puerto Montt.  I’d covered a fair bit of that territory in previous trips, but there were still a few fjords that’d gone unexplored and a few hot springs that’d gone unsoaked.  

Having spent the last few years living in the Wasatch, I’ve got an absurdly skewed expectation of how accessible ski terrain should be, and that expectation has been slowly eroded during my time in Patagonia.  The jungle is very very jungly.  

I went on a few thicketeering missions during the last trip, and during that time, I learned a few tips and tricks to make it easier to travel in the rainforest:

• You’ve got to wear high boots or waders because there are plenty of streams and holes and bogs and swamps that’ll swallow you up otherwise.
• Walking up streams / climbing waterfalls means that the foliage is less dense (even if you’re submerged up to your waist most of the time) and the traveling is much faster.
• Carrying a staff lets you whack stuff out of the way (which is supremely satisfying), probe the ground for quick-sandesque swamp holes, and keep your footing in a fast moving streams.
• Gortex doesn’t stand a chance of keeping you dry, rubber fishing jackets are the only thing that can begin to stand up to the rigors of thorns and bushes and constant rain.
• Steep approaches go a bit slower in terms of distance, but faster in terms of vertical feet gained.
• Machetes are pretty useless, everything is either too thick to be macheteable or thin enough that its faster to just bull your way through.  
• Land slides and/or lava flows that demolish foliage are your friend.

Even with all of the learning and exploring I did, I still haven’t been able to find anywhere that’d allow you to complete the approach, make turns, and get back to the boat during the same day.  Unless I find some magic further south, it’ll have to be a multi day mission with a night of sleeping in the jungle.  Or perhaps I’ll just have to resign myself to road – accessed skiing instead.  Time will tell.  

Often times, there are huge rivers that flow out of the heads of the fjords, and while the Rascal draws to much water to safely navigate up them, the Superhighway is the perfect tool for the job.  With just one person in her, she can get up on plane, which means that she only draws about 6 inches of water, and she can go about 10 kts which is faster than any whitewater I’m interested in running in reverse.  

Lots of these rivers don’t ever see any human traffic, and its neat to be able to explore into such remote nooks and crannies.  

At the edge of one fjord, dozens of miles from the nearest road, there is a research station dedicated to learning more about the plants, animals, and aquatic creatures that inhabit Chilean Patagonia. A friend in Puerto Montt told me about it, and I decided to sail over to check it out one morning.  

It’s settled at the edge of a gorgeous valley, with tall peaks and glaciers looming over the top of it.  I rowed over to their dock and was met by a German computer scientist who had been there for more than a year.  Apparently they see very few long distance sailors (I was the first in more than a year) and he was kind enough to show me around the grounds and tell me about some of the research that was going on.  The facility itself is beautiful, and everyone I met was digging into something interesting.  

There is a certain type of conifer in Chile called the Alerce which is somewhat akin to the California redwood – they grow very slowly for thousands of years and reach an incredible height and girth.  One day, someone came across one that was apparently dead, but still standing in the forest above the research facility.  A section was taken from the trunk and they decided to try and compare its rings to other historical records to determine its age.  Except that nothing seemed to match up quite right.  

Eventually they decided to carbon date it and they found that this tree (which was still standing) had died 1600 years ago!  It has been dead since before the time of Muhammad.  Yet still it stands in the woods.  The middle ages came and went and still it stands.  It didn’t notice when Columbus crossed the Atlantic, nor when Chile became independent hundreds of years later.  It was just standing there, dead as a doornail all of those years through rain and snow and wind and hail.  Silent and unmoving and gigantic.  Probably no human being ever even came across it until these last few decades. 

Perhaps even more incredible is this: they found the tree to be 2400 years old at the time when it died.  Which means that it was born 4000 years in the past.  FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO! Incomprehensively old.  And yet there in front of me was a polished block of wood, looking like a sparkling piece of furniture, as real and solid as a rock.  And I could touch it and inspect it and marvel at it.  And I did.

It took me quite a while to get over this incredible block of Alerce, but when I did, we had lunch (cooked by their live-in chef!) and went on a short hike up into the woods.  The day was clear and the views were spectacular both before and after sunset.  

That was the beginning of an incredible stretch of dry, clear weather and I spent the next few days tromping through the woods, searching for hidden hiking trails, fishing, and going on adventures in the superhighway.

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Things were very quiet and calm in the fjords and I soaked up the solitude and the nature and the sunsets.

Most of these fjords are dotted with waterfalls that are fed from either glacier melt or springs high in the mountains.  This fresh water, falling into the sea, is less dense than the salt water, and forms a cap across the surface of the fjord.  On particularly clear nights, without clouds to insulate the earth from the freezing depths of space, the temperature plummets.  On these rare occasions, the freshwater on the surface can freeze.  On my last morning in the fjords, the Rascal had the great pleasure of becoming an ice breaker.

At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  “Is the Rascal really surrounded by ice right now?” I asked myself.  But my ears couldn’t be fooled.  The sound of the Rascal cutting through it was like the sound of a thousand fairies whispering in your ear.  

The ice would slowly bridge up at the bow, and shatter into a thousand fragments and skitter across the surface of the ice, bending and folding and yielding.  The Rascal plunged through with reckless abandon and left a jumble of shards and slush in her wake.  

Sailing with B
During my sophomore year of college I had the good fortune to become acquainted with a man named Brendan Ryan.  We quickly bonded over our love of skiing and grilled meats and we’ve been good friends ever since.  Over the past half dozen years or so, we’ve been living on other sides of the continent and only get to see each other sporadically, which is truly tragic.  We happened to connect on a skype call one afternoon, and two weeks later his plane touched down in Puerto Montt.  

After a trip to the market, a few empanadas, a few dozen escudos, and a provisioning run, we pulled out of Puerto Montt and headed back down to the fjords.  B hadn’t done much sailing before, but he was eager to dig in, and after a day or two of showers, the weather was predicted to be settled for almost a week.  

There was a low cloud deck for our sail, but the morning after we anchored, the clouds lifted, and the majesty of Chilean Patagonia beamed down on us in all her glory!

We spent the next several days exploring the woods, going on hikes, soaking in the hot springs, and eating delicious mussels, plucked right out of the sea.  

The weather was great almost the entire time and we spent our nights catching up, grilling choice Chilean steaks, and drinking boxed wine as B lost at cribbage.  

Superhighway adventures were plentiful and we even managed to use her as a floating stage for honing our air guitar (and/or air flute) skills.  

Our return to Puerto Montt ended up being substantially less casual than our time in the fjords.  Our first day of sailing was pretty laid back with very light winds and clear skies.  The air was exceptionally clear and visibility was at an all-time high.  

Neptune even saw fit to provide us with a top-notch sunset.  That was the last piece of good fortune we were to enjoy, however.  

We anchored that night near a small fishing town that was apparently hosting an all night dance party lazer light show complete with loud thumping base, screaming drunkards, and close Rascal drive-bys.  Ordinarily we would’ve joined right in, but we had to get up before dawn the next morning to make it to PM before a strong front that was moving in. 

After a fitful night’s sleep, we rose at 4am, brought in the anchor and started motor sailing north with a very light (2-4kt) wind – just enough to fill the sails.  All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a 25 or 30 kt gust slammed into the Rascal and heeled her over in a major way.  Her lee rail buried itself and water started sloshing into the cockpit.  The added weatherhelm was enough to get her to tack across the wind and all of a sudden she was totally heeled over in the other direction.  I got down to sheet and let it loose so that the jib would spill its wind.  The Rascal quit heeling over, but the wind was still strong and the jib was flogging around like crazy.  We were both silent as all of this transpired, but B’s eyes were about the size of flying saucers and it was pretty clear he was scared half to death.  I went up front to drop the jib and the Rascal promptly decided to eat one of the jib sheets for breakfast and by the time I got back to the cockpit, it was totally wrapped around the propellor and the engine had died.

We took stock of our situation for a second and found that we were both safe and sound, and there wasn't any damage to the boat besides the prop that was inoperable.  We spent a few fruitless minutes trying to get it untangled, but the high winds, the big waves, and the fact that it was still 5 in the morning (and totally and completely dark out) we never had a chance.  But, of course, sailboats are made for sailing and thats exactly what we did.  Except we were sailing into a very fluky 20kt wind with huge waves, a 2-3kt contrary current, and no light to see the islands that were around us.  Options didn't abound, however, so we kept tacking into the wind - sometimes making ground, and sometimes losing it.  We talked over our options as we waited for the sun to rise (and a hell of a sunrise it was!).

We had several options - we could keep sailing and wait for the tide to change in our favor, we could find some place to careen the Rascal and wait for the tide to go out to fix the prop, or we could anchor some place and dive on it to remove the rope.  I was for the last option, but B has something of a phobia (certainly well founded) of people getting in cold water.  Careening the Rascal would've been safest, but wouldn't get us back to land in time for B's flight.  Continuing to sail north was the easiest option so we continued doing it until the wind died.  Eventually it became clear that diving was the only option and we drifted back into our anchorage from the night before, giving up the 3-4 nautical miles that we'd fought for over the course of the previous 8 hours of sailing.  

I don't own a wetsuit, but I threw on some long underwear and a couple base layer shirts and jumped into the 50F water.   B had a line around me in case things went bad and I started hacking away at the rat's nest around the prop with my 10" chef's knife.  It was a fierce battle, but after about 10 minutes in the water, I had the prop free and we were on our way again.  Some miniature bratwursts and a heavy down jacket had me warmed up and ready for action in no time! 

We figured the day's drama was over, but it was getting late in the day and the aforementioned strong front was starting to build in.  Before we knew it, we were motor sailing into 30 kts of wind with the jiblet and double reefed main up, taking water into the cockpit and holding on for dear life.  It probably would've been best to just throw in the towel, but B's flight was the next morning and we didn't have much mileage to make.  The wind howled and we gritted our teeth and eventually blasted through a narrow pass to find anchorage by the mainland.  By the time we finally turned the corner, the wind was gusting to 35 and the rigging was singing with the strain of the tiny sails and the battering of the waves.  

The stress of the day slowly gave way to a protected anchorage and a glass of port to finish off the trip.  It was certainly a dramatic way to end things, and we were both happy to be back on dry land the next morning as we hitch hiked to the airport.  

Stay tuned for the next chapter - which will include a month of skiing pow, touring hot springs, and gallivanting through wine country with the whole Haney clan!