Looking over Ushuaia east down the Beagle Channel
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Report 21 February - Team B on board Pelagic safely back in Ushuaia
Sun 21st Feb 20.00Metropolis Ushuaia here we are. Arriving in the early evening we are happy, thinking of our first dinner in 30 days at a normal table not to mention our first calm night of sleep after 5 days of almost non-stop sailing.
When we passed Cape Horn, yesterday in the afternoon, proper bad weather was coming in. With windspeeds up to 42 knots it wouldn't be wise to sail the Beagle Channel.The wind would push us back, allowing no more speed than a maximum of 2 knots an hour - a waste of energy. Late in the evening we decided to anchor in a little bay near Puerto Toro, scanning sea and shoreline with strong torches for the right spot to drop the anchor and stop. How strange and exciting it was waking up this morning and findin ourselves in a bay surrounded by green leafy trees and -even more amazing- finding a fly in the toilet, the first insect after weeks without buzzings. Great.
After a decent breakfast with steak left-overs and potatoes, we left for our first aim:Puerto Williams at the Chilean-Argentinean border. There we had to clear out of Chile and fortunately this went surprisingly quickly. Normally you have to deal with bureaucratic officials who take hours with all the procedures, now we were off again within one hour.
For several hours we had spells of sunlight which brought us marvellous views on the snowy mountains on both sides of the channel. Sailing into Argentinean waters we had to fly their blue, white, blue national flag again. It is a sailing rule to raise the flag of the country whose waters you are travelling through. Hamish,our skipper had a little Argentinean one that surely will not survive many more years on this boat's mast and he raised it rather unwillingly. 'I am a citizen of Planet Earth he argued and I would rather fly a flag of the Earth as a whole, not a nationalist one.
We enthusiastically agreed with him on that, although we were not so sure about the amount of support the idea would get throughout the world. Hamish however was already another step ahead of us, considering problems of a different order:'..We might get problems with aliens who feel offended by being excluded from our earth-space.' Anyway we carried on sailing and arrived here in a cloud covered Ushuaia in pouring rain.
For Adrian this was the perfect setting for our arrival: 'If the skies would be blue and the sun shining bright, this day wouldn't fit as the ending of a challenging expedition.This I like, it is just what we need now.' What most of us need most now is feet on solid ground and a pub!