Sailing Aboard Schooner Motu: South and East to Pto Natales

January 15, 2017

We are continuing to make our way south as the weather permits. As previously noted, bad weather rules here and patience is the sailing virtue. The distance between Puerto Eden, a fishing village of about 250 hearty souls and Puerto Natales, a tourist center of 20,000 people, for visits to the gem of Chilean national parks, Torres del Paine, is about 260 miles without any diversions. This is an area pretty much without people but lots of exhibits of raw nature from whales to goofy steamer ducks. We saw our first foreign boat, other than our British Columbia friends on Heart and Soul, since starting this leg of the trip while anchored in Puerto Bueno (S50 59 and W074 13). She was a expedition type big powerboat out of New York named Argo. What a shock! It also looked pretty comfy.

Keeping in mind that it is summer down here, we’ve been a little surprised at the almost continual rain and the few days where wind drops enough for a comfortable trip even though the wind is almost always behind us. If the gribs are showing 30 plus knots, you must always be careful to account for gusts that can come roaring off the sides of the fjords that can pack a real wallop. Our schooner has two hoyt self-tending booms from which we fly a jib and a staysail. We normally can go “wing and wing” and clip right along. We do not put up the mainsail here due to our worry about gusts.

However, the real problem is the rain! We like to be able to see where we are going. Yes, we have radar and we use it but in driving squalls, I doubt we would see the small wood Chilean fish boats or bergie-bits (pieces of ice in the channel from the numerous glaciers). This does not mean we sit in an anchorage waiting for the sun to come out but we do try to avoid the real messy weather days.

For all you sailor friends, for the weather we download primarily four weather models from Predictwind via our Iridium Go satellite modem. We then stir the tea leaves to figure out what to expect. We’ve heard many reports that the grip files do not accurately portray what is happening in the channels but we’ve found to the contrary that Predictwind GFS and the GFS models are pretty accurate. The Euro model doesn’t work so well as it always is over-predicting the amount of rain and under-predicting the amount of wind.

We also have an expensive ($500) electronic barometer, an ASI Aquatech Scientific Instruments, that has an amazing ability to forecast coming spells of wind, rain, etc. The common lore here is the wind precedes the barometer but once again, we have not found this to be the case.

Speaking of weather, we go and travel for days with barometer readings below 1000 mb. After all, it is summer.

Our Heart and Soul friends claim summer down here is like winter on Vancouver Island. They might have a good point since we are running our Antarctic diesel heater pretty much non-stop to keep the temperature in the boat around 67 degrees (19C) in the day and 60 degrees (15C) at night. The heater on low setting uses about 1.2 gallon (US) or roughly 3.78 liters, a day.

Before ending this blog, Marja is insistent that I mention something about anchoring and tying ashore in each new anchorage. Many of the caletas are small and deep and require you to take lines ashore. The trick is to drop the anchor close to shore in reasonably shallow water with the stern facing the direction of the wind and then get out a couple of lines (God Forbid but sometimes more than two). This all sounds easy but believe me Barnum and Bailey could not come up with a better clown act than the two of us often going through this maneuver. The reasons are simple, our dear schooner Motu likes to head directly toward the nearest obstruction when in reverse, the wind normally blows the yacht away direction of the wind where you want to tie the boat, and then on top of all that, you risk life and limb attempting to scramble over slimy rocks and a desperate search for a tree or something you can tie to.