Yacht charter Cape Horn and Glaciers - Chile

Highlights: Beagle channel, Cape Horn, Patagonia, Ushuaia, Puerto Williams

When to go: December to March

Suggested tour: Ushuaia- Puerto Williams - Puerto Toro - Cape Horn - Puerto Williams - Beagle channel - Ushuaia

Mileage (approx) : 240

Cruise length: 1 week for Cape Horn OR Glaciers, 2 weeks for both

Difficulty : very high

Weather: very cold

Punta Arenas to Beagle Channel
This is by far our favourite Patagonian route: the landscape is incredibly dramatic, the coast is packed with coves, inlets, bays and channels, many of them barely known, and the whole course meanders through a perfectly deserted, weather-beaten and gale-pestered area full of mountains and glaciers. Due to the nature of the place, a cruise between Punta Arenas and Ushuaia must be planned in good advance and one cannot expect to follow a strict schedule. It can be done in 7 days, it might take 2 weeks, and one can get lost in there forever. If one can chose, the best way to go is starting from Punta Arenas, because there are very few things more distressing than beating up 40 knots of wind and 2 knots of current in the narrow Beagle Channel. We tried one day and we managed 7 miles made good in 8 hours of hard beating. It’s frustrating to tack several times close to the same effing tree….

Punta Arenas is a lovely town. The blocks are well laid and airy – could not be otherwise, especially when the wind picks up in the afternoon and sweeps the town mercilessly– some buildings are magnificent, trees abound, the outskirts show an ordered collection of pleasant suburbs with coloured houses, streets are wide and clean, the business district and the tax free area offer all you can desire at decent prices, and people are very, very friendly. Not a bad place to live if you love incessant wind.
On water like on land, humanity is different in Patagonia. I am no judge, and cannot say if worse or better. Mariolina told me that there must be something like a filter at parallel 40ºS and assholes find it difficult to pass under sail. The mesh is not too fine, of course, and exceptions exist. But the community of sailors, like the community of people ashore, looks somehow closer. Maybe it is because the first thing you have to learn down here is to help yourself, you will find people incredibly helpful. There is an atmosphere of safety and mutual protection, a spirit of hands on the same ship. It might be the harsh climate, the long distances from everywhere else, but this cold, freezing, gloomy, godforsaken, bleakly, depressing, distressing, bleak, discouraging, dreary, dismal, squally, daunting, gusty, uninviting place is very warm indeed.

South of Punta Arenas the hills increase in altitude and pleasant forests challenge the power of meadows and prairies. Greens are more intense, sign of increasing rainfall. Thirty miles towards Antarctica and the road ends under the old walls of the King Phillip City or, at the last crossroad of the continent, on the beach of Bahia Mansa and its moored fishing fleet.

From now on along the strait, there is nothing else. The only settler here is winter.
After few miles the Estrecho de Magallanes makes a wide bend of 120 degrees and turns northwest, entering a distinct, wilder, more majestic world. The size of things, previously lost in flatness, assumes a grander, more massive scale. When the view slowly opens to the fortunate voyager, verticality enters the scene. Rock jumps out of the liquid steely turmoil and climbs up eagerly and steeply, at first covered with courageous but battered trees, then by a thin layer of mosses, than by a sparse film of lichens before ending, when not into grey clouds, under a thick cover or ice and snow. The same vertical section moves NW, symmetrically on both sides of the channel, in endless variations of the same theme, in a succession of valleys and steep shoulders equally inhospitable, wild and majestic. The shores, previously straight and shelter-less, begin to follow this mountainous geology, bending into coves and inlets of various dimensions. Soon the Patagonian absurd geographic pattern is in full swing, with an unequalled complication of lines that, if stretched out, might well round the world a few times.

Moreover, Magellanes combines this with grandeur and size. All is big. Waves, mountains, glaciers, walls, rocks, ridges. And long. There are more than 180 miles to the end of it. The Strait of Magellan, even with water, can easily swallow the Grand and Glenn Canyon; dry it out, adding twelve hundred more metres of abyss, and there is room for a lot of nature..

Sailing from Occasion to Beagle along Canal Brecknock and Bahia Desolada is definitely rewarding, provided one does not hit the many obstacles along the way. For what I believe to be a stroke of luck, the area was flat as a mill pond all the four times I sailed through. There are plenty of very well sheltered anchorages well worth exploring, like Caleta Frog and Caleta Fanny, and while the whole area is far less dramatic, certain corners are so welcoming to become somewhat romantic. One can think about bringing here a mountain chalet and enjoy a perfect balance of mountains and sea, the first neither too far to lose splendour nor to close to become threatening, the sea able to induce both, desire to explore and a certain hope to do so unpunished.

Continuing west the route takes us back again close to the cordillera soon after Paso O’Brien. The Patagonian channels are a place where even a car in an empty parking lot can produce its own weather opposing its elevation to the wet wind. No wonder then that the entrance of Beagle can be often hidden in thick mucky drizzle, or incessant squalls, both having the notable effect of releasing a curtain over the world outside the lifelines. And no wonder the Chileans placed the first of their endless control stations here. Recently the navy saw the light and instead of displacing three males, decided to let a single one have a go, but with the wife. This is very cost effective (wives are not paid) and has a very pleasant effect on the passing sailors, who are often greeted by charming voices asking the usual lot of data, but in a sweet voice.

The Beagle channel certainly deserves the nickname of Glacier Highway. It is straight and the boat meets several hanging cascades of ice on the left during its voyage E. This is also where tennis might have been invented, because the wind can only blow either 0 or 40, often in the same game… er, hour. These contrasts are even amplified, if possible, when you enter the many inlets that hide a tidal glacier at the end, the most famous of which are Seno Pia and Garibaldi. True, to see the big calibers of tidal glaciering you have to be 4-500 miles north, where for example Pio XI glacier (pictured) boasts a face 5 miles wide and a never ending calving show. But to get to those corners one has to take a Sabbatical and also found a sailor sane enough to get into those channels. As the philosopher Jagger used to say, ‘You cannot always get what you want’.