Puerto Natales to Puerto Eden and back

We finally left Puerto Natales the 21st of May and sailed through the impossibly narrow Paso White flanked by granite and ice, towers of rock. We had a nice tailwind the second half of the day and we were doing 7-8kts for a few hours anyway. The next day was pivotal... good weather, as in, light winds forcast for the next 36 hours. So we motored and sailed from 8am to 5pm the following day, about 31 hours straight and we covered 140 miles putting us within a comfortable two days of Puerto Eden (a trip that we thought would take us 2-3weeks was going to take under a week. Plans only changed a bit:

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Diary entry from May 25

While radioing the passing Navimag ferry on our way to Canal Wide (to find out about schedules for my return to puerto natales) we made the faux pas (sp?) of staying on channel 16 (which is the channel used only for hailing a boat, you are then supposed to go to another channel to talk). When we finished talking though we heard a familiar voice hailing the Persimmon... It was Bob again!!! we must have passed him on our night sail and he was some 20miles behind us. As a way of waiting up for Bob we decided to do the remaining 15 miles to the closest anchorage as opposed to our original plan which was to continue another 10 miles... we also decided to go to Glaciar Pío XI, Latin America´s biggest glacier, measuring more than 3.5km wide and 50 meter tall face. It flows like an icy tongue out of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. That night Bob didn´t show up until 2am so I only saw him this morning at breakfast - everyone was genuinly happy to see eachother... but in the end Bob decided not to come to Ventisquero Pío XI with us. If that were the case I would have been able to sail with Bob for a day or two but instead we arranged to meet in Puerto Eden in two days.
The sun lifted, shedding a curtain of yellow light all over the mountains and the wind blew lightly out of the north. Sailing would have taken us days so we motored straight into the wind. The first few hours were relatively uneventful if you don´t count the white white cony and humpy mountains, whose perfect reaching peaks found refuge in the pancake clouds. From 18miles (thats around 32km) we could already catch a glimpse of the glacier!! thats how big it is, the size, they say, of Santiago!!! At about five miles out, when it looked like surely we were at its doorstep as we threaded our way dodging crystaly ice in the water, giant aqua blue bergs and small dark pitted groulers, the efervescant sun spewing its own royal blue through the prisms of ice. This is when the dolphins came. There were at least 10 dolphins, some babies as well. For almost an hour as we motored to the gargantuan face through the graveyard of fallen ice walls, floating in an ever more serene channel, the dolphins swam with us, showing off; jumping 2, 3, 4 at a time, fully breaching out of the water to show their entire bodies, weaving, splashing cutting lines around the entire boat, swimming on their backs and on their sides to show white bellies.
All this with the backdrop of an ever growing (only for our own eyes) glacier. We hit a few growlers on our way in, shuddering the boat to a halt... soon after we arrived at the wall, the ever-low sun began to set over this continental filed of ice, this slowmotion river, a tummultuous mass of icetowers that flow down from the conical and sharktooth mountains for thousands of years. I climbed the mast and I could hear the thunderoush treacherous cracks of ice and could see small chunks, and at the end a shack or cottage size chunk, cleaving off and tumbling into the glassy water, throwing up waves, like mini tsunamis.
The left edge of the wall had a blue spot that I have never seen, this magnetic blue that drew my eyes into the layers of thousand of years of ice. A blue, a holy, unroyal story, untellable and absolutely uncomprehensible but fully alluring. I was sucked into a cavy crachy layered mess of blue, a glassy, steepled moving castle, no a mobile city of ice that has watched everything for millenia!!!
The funny currents, created by the meltwater (I presume) we could see move the glassy crystally shards of ice, blue and orange now with the parting sun, crimson on a mirror float and flow on a swell. Froim time to time a crack and a few chunks of ice would come of the wall and crash into the water beside the wall´s pitted foundation. Mario and I got off the boat to stand on a floating piece of ice. Alone, on a piece of floating frigid water...nothing around but currents and water and a golden sun in the swirling mirror of the city of ice... At night I made potato gnocchi and a simple tomoto sauce with grated romano...mmmm... and then a clear sky in winter, in patagonia... and a full moon...life does not get much better than this!!!.
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When we got to Puerto Eden, Bob was already there and we hung out a lot, playing chess and baking brownies (for Bob´s birthday) and talking about life and pacifism (and its effectiveness, or ineffectiveness) about free will, vegetarianism, about Ulysses (which i was reading on the boat) and literary criticism... HEAVY SHIT! but lots of fun. There was a bit of drama at the end, shortly before I left but we all left on a good note. I thanked them all for everything and for challenging my opinions, which I realized had become a bit stale and I believed them just because I had always believed them.

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Puerto Eden has few people, maybe 50 or so. 6 of them are pure blood Kaweshkar indians... probably 20 are police and armada and the rest are fisherman. We brought our laundry for a woman, Doña Patricia to do, and we just hung out, not really chatting much, just there, in her house drinking mate and here and there saying something of little consequence. She kept inviting us back to hang out. In our search for diesel, which we finally found, we went to the house of Manuel Maldonado, and after this I confirmed to myself that this was stepping back in time. This man´s house, among the squalor of rotting boardwalks and abandoned shacks, and little habited houses that have no telephones, could exist in Las Condes (the rich neighbourhood of Santiago) He has satelite internet and longdistance phone as well as satellite tv. He has all the trappings of a modern "home". After talking a lot with the police guys (a bunch of really cool, down to earth guys that were welcoming and interested) I found out that Don Manuel is the defacto owner of the town. He owns a fish farm in Puerto Montt and the means to transport everything that is fished in Puerto Eden to P.Montt to be sold. He buys everything that has been fished at 2000pesos the kilo and sells it in Puerto Montt at 7000pesos the kilo...
Like a step back in time.

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Now I do not want to dwell on this but my last 24 hours after a surreal goodbye to my crew and captain, were tumultuous and costly to say the least. I was assured by my friends at the police station in Eden that I would not have to pay the "gringo" price on the ferry. (The Navimag charges foreigners the 300 dollars US from Puerto Eden, which is the price from Puerto Montt ie. they charge about 4 times what they should.)
I got on the ferry and the policeman talked to some guys he said would talk for me and I was brought to the room to pay. I explained that I had no credit card(a white lie) and only 40,000 pesos (about 80$, the truth). They after speaking with the captain they kindly made an exception for me. After writing an authorized reciept the captain asked for my passport. I asked him why but didn´t really think twice because chilean authorities are more than anal when it comes to foreigners´movements within the country. As night fell he returned my passport to me and I spent the rest of the time hanging out and playing chess with some young guys fromt he armada. When we arrived after 24 hours of navigation I was told to go to the bridge and was met by 3 intimidating International Police force officers. They wanted to know what I was doing in Chile, where I was going, they searched all my bags. Let me say I was angry and I let them know that they were being unreasonable in treating me like a criminal and that it was not fair. They phoned their headquarters to check up on my visa and seemed to be surprised to see that it was indeed registered. Then they asked me where I was going, I said Ushuaia, they said how, I said by bus, they said so you have money, I said in my bank (BIG FUCKING MISTAKE!) They said thank you and went to talk to the captain. They then escorted me to the office and told me that I had two options, pay the remainder of the 300$ or not and have my name in all the police stations so that I would be unable to leave the country. At this juncture I truly lost it, because I felt cheated and tried to explain that I would not have even gotten on the boat had I not been offered the discounted rate, I can not afford this. They lied to me and on top of it all they were patronizing me. In the end, after considering a few options that could have got me off but also could have ended in much more serious legal consequences I decided to swallow my pride, and my sense of justice, and my rationality and just pay the money. The man at the desk was very surprised when I came in very calm and appologized for my behaviour and gave him the cash.

I´m just glad thats over, but it was a bit of a nasty note to end on... next step... I don´t know... I´m waiting for snow in Ushuaia and meanwhile going to try to get back in shape after my sedentary month and a half on a boat!
Until next time...