Under sail into the heart of the Andes
(discover Peel Inlet also on the pages of Outside Magazine)

The perception of achievement brings two possible frames of mind to adventurous bipeds: the first is elation, l’élan of the French, the burning desire to keep momentum. The second is gratification, and/or a pleasant wish to slow down, rest and roll in the warm sleeping bag, the summer of our contentment. Our team of six was not equally split between these two schools of thought when we woke up, pleasantly hugged by the sound of the incessant rain on the deck, in one of the least visited anchorages of Patagonia, the last  place on the chart with numbers before the magical words ‘unsurveyed’.

True enough the previous day had been the most incredible sailing experience we had since we had left Seattle 9,000 miles greener and four months younger. We had woken up in a thinner drizzle than usual, finally sober after a whole day spent trying to get out of Caleta Amalia between furious blasts and swallowing aspirins to fight the terrible hangover from the previous night. In the excitement of the meeting with S/V ‘Fernande’, the first sailboat we came across since the Galapagos, we had unwisely engaged her passengers in a last-blood backgammon tournament washed down with Johnny Walker Blue Label. After all we had been rolling dices since Mexico and our vessel’s honour was on stake.

The plan was to sail into Peel inlet, one of Patagonia deepest and most challenging fjords, due to that distressing habit of ice to float down from it, and to reach the place where HW Tilman’s boat came to grief 40 years earlier while his owner was making the first crossing of the Patagonian Icecap. Being Tilman my personal idol and the inspiration at the bottom of a foolish sailplan that started from Alaskan glaciers to reach South American ones, the level of expectation was somewhat high. Needless to say we were not planning to come to grief ourselves…

            One of the characteristics of inlets with a tidal glacier at its end is a thermal and mischievous circulation of air that makes sure wind will mainly flow from the frozen end towards the warmer entrances, and Peel had several first class glaciers doing a fine job to prove this rule. So when we were soon welcomed by a fine and freezing breeze between 15 and 20 knots opposing our toiling we could not feign too much bewilderment.

Tacking upwind into a narrow glacial inlet with silty waters is always fatiguing, never straightforward and seldom prudent; doing this against the stream and the ice with a plastic boat borders insanity. A hand was stationed on the bow, teeth chattering in the wind and constantly moving his arms to help the helmsman avoid the more menacing guys. The ice was concentrated in the E side, but we kept trying to get as close to the white flow as possible, a choice that could have, to the untrained eye, raised doubts in relation to our sanity. But the apparent lunacy had two reasons: first of all the water was smoother when surrounded by ice, thus making it easier to spot the floes just out of the silty surface, a task rarely alleviated by choppy waves. Second, it would have reduced the number of necessary tacks. While on the east’n’ice-bound tack, when the motion of the bowman’s arms started to resemble that of a chap with a tarantula crawling on his back, it was time to alter course and go towards the west shores, so steep that we could safely moor to them in places. Bowman and attention notwithstanding, every five minutes or so we had the pleasure of seeing one of the crew below popping out to see if it was time to get the emergency grab-bags, after hearing the hostile noise of the ice scratching and hitting the hull. Why did I choose a plastic boat?

            But our perseverance, read idiocy, was rewarded.  Two thirds up the inlet the wind had calmed down and the ice had become sparser, due to the fact that it was coming from the Calvo arm, a group of inlets spreading eastwards. We motored for another hour to the last and only cove mentioned by the sailing directions, where the scallop fishermen use to moor and where, ‘prompted by necessity and without much hope for tranquillity’, an anchorage could be endeavoured. By then we were used to the scenic and gloomy grandeur of the Patagonian Inlets, and Peel is no exception: steep cliffs that soon lose their thick mantle of vegetation to rise bald and bright with water up towards the snow and the glaciers of the Icecap, with pleasant green valleys, spectacular waterfalls and brown rock walls. We let go and tied up to the trees of the shores of a round cove around 100 yards wide, with the pastoral view of a wide valley spreading northwest right beyond Mischief Narrows – named after Tilman famous cutter - where a seemingly constant flow of ice marked the entrance of the last section of the Inlet and its secrets. The red cutter had come to grief right in front of us 40 years before.

            The following morning the rain was thick and we could barely see the shores. It was therefore easy for Nick, Chaz, Paola and self to be champions of the ’contented’ school, and start an amazing Wist battle with our nearly destroyed cards. Different was the position of Andrea: he finally had arrived to the place where men are men, at last all that unsteady and undrinkable water he had been seeing for over 58 days was over and he could get his boots off the sea bag. He knew there were mountains and rocks up there and rain was not going to stop him. He got ready, dressed up for a Himalayan struggle and disembarked. Few travellers new to the area are familiar with a special feature of Patagonian bushes: they are thick. I mean, really thick. Once we could nearly roll down a slope just bouncing on the branches of the local beech. Anyway, we could clearly check Andrea’s progression from the boat, a mixture of swearing and breaking branches. After an hour he was back, his progress never got close to 50 yards.

            At his mournful return, far from being smothered by defeat, he had changed idea about Mark’s previous suggestion of using the kayak to visit the upper fjord. Our Canadian friend, the other restless, had finally arrived to the place where men are men and so on... He did not sail a whole 2-people kayak all the way down here from Victoria, BC, just to use it as a garbage container, dash it!! And off they went…

We fished them up from the kayak around 4 hours later. We could not get much out of their account for two reasons: first they were cold and could barely speak, second we were busy in a wist final… Anyway, they had experienced nearly every possible variety of drizzle, from the wet air to the airy water, but could easily glide into the inlet via the small passage south of Tilman Island – useless to sailboats. They paddled and paddled into the inlet but the view was not the kind to encourage great feats, so they paddled back. Admittedly they had some difficulty in finding the boat in the mist… No wonder. We did not complain, anyway, by their lack of reports… Wist is game for 4 players and we had not much use for two grumbling and inpatient spectators.

            By night time the rain was gone, we could see some blue clouds in the sky and the glass was rising – a piece of information, this last one, that while exceedingly valuable at sea, is mostly useless when one is lost in a maze of deep fjords and high mountains. We had been 4 days in the area and had experienced nothing even close to a partly cloudy sky. We would have paid for a simple overcast.

            We awoke in a classic Patagonian day of grey sky and clouds veiling the slopes, but no rain: we could actually see something. We felt it was as good as one could get and weighed. We also could not lose too much time: true, we had a shower and found some cans four days before in a godforsaken village named sarcastically Puerto Eden, 320 days of rain a year, but that was the first shower in 31 days out of Easter Island, not exactly a metropolis itself. We really were having dreams of beef roasting on grills, lavender, booze and of the drier skies of Puerto Natales… And there the Chilean Navy was eagerly waiting for us, after we had made ourselves conspicuous by choosing a rarely used ocean route (the British Admiralty still does not possess enough data for the area between Easter Island and Southern Chile) and after the usual complications with women on foreign soil – this time in the shape of a loose specimen in the Interpol list. But that was my entire fault; I had recommended going after women rather than booze, trying therefore to keep the damage away from the boat. As it turned out, they went for both, with dreadful results that dit not pass unnoticed by the Chilean authorities. But that is another story.

            Cadeau, that’s the name of our vessel, was soon in the channel facing the narrows, where the current did not seem too strong. She certainly had seen worse. Mid-channel is usually the recommended route into unknown waterways, but that’s exactly what poor Procter thought while powering up with Mischief four decades before. The sailing directions we trusted mentioned that a vessel had previously sailed successfully through by keeping close to the left side, sounding 4 fathoms most of the way. And to that side we steered our course, keeping in mind one of the pillars of Admiralty Pilots – a vessel might come to grief where other passed unpunished. Such was not the case, because we indeed kept sounding 4 fathoms while hugging the shore very closely. We inched forward, our caution supported by the contrary stream, while ice seemed sparse and always following the midchannel course – ice is dangerous but somewhat gullible. After 20 minutes we were done with the narrows, sounding more than 80 fathoms. Then, right when we thought we had won, we entered an area of favourable and fast counter-current that shot us up the inlet into rapidly shelving waters. In less than a minute we were sounding 9 fathoms, and a wide variety of noises, mostly clearing throat practice, started challenging the puttering of the engine…

But the dial graced us and our keel, probably it was just another underwater moraine, and we could keep going, favouring the left shores to avoid the ice flowing along the SE side of the inlet. Once inside, we could finally relax a bit and look around. That’s when we discovered that someone else had been there a century before… Turner, Bruckner and Friedrich, the Romantic masters. Their paintings and music were indeed more capable of registering what we were experiencing than our cameras and pens. Their stormy skies, frozen on canvas, were now boisterously on top of us; their peaks and glaciers, so mystified in the artistic transposition, were ripping the clouds apart, struggling to give us a view.  And Bruckner’s musical wilderness, jumping between the shores of this faraway inlet, radicated a deeper memory of those sensations.

For a few minutes we enjoyed the matchless view of three superb peaks, rising over a cascade of ice to over 8000ft, tearing through the clouds and busy in their daily struggle against the incessant blizzards flowing from the Pacific, and doing such a fine job to leave the other side in a similarly perpetual drought. We had sailed right into the heart of the Andes.

          After a few hours we were giving Calvo Inlet a try.  Here we were humbled in any possible way. First of all the ice, filling the whole entrance, reminded us that one cannot expect too many open doors, no matter how hard you try. Then a more human encounter flattened every possible dream of glory: while searching an opening in the slush, we had the vision of a red and blue fishing boat coming towards us. On the bow, close to a compressor, a smiling face emerged from a black wetsuit. From a frail and diminutive pilothouse, a second smiling face was greeting us to Chile. We were just speechless, and by the time we could react with some fags and wine, they had already thrown a bag of scallops on our deck. These folks were used to spend even a straight month in this area, clamming and scalloping… by hand!!! I mean, they were really jumping into this slush every day. It’s like living in a martini glass, without the alcohol to keep going…Who were we, pretentious intruders, with our heating system, down sleeping bags and comfortable mattresses, to claim as a great feat what they were doing normally every day? Come on, would you read the story of a Chilean fisherman who goes to London to cast into the Serpentine?