Escape Expeditions 21 April 2013
Not too much to report today.  It's been raining off and on for two days so we've been taking advantage of the down time to stow things a little better on the boat and to explore some of the local areas with the dinghy.  I'm getting much better with the dinghy and I'm very happy with the Suzuki 20 hp motor we bought.  It's probably more power than we need, but I can just idle along and still make very good progress.

Yesterday, since it was raining, Elaine gave me a haircut.  I really needed it since I've been down here since 15 March already.  We didn't have any clippers, but she did a good job with just scissors and a comb.

 After the haircut, the rain let up a bit so Jay and I took the dinghy down river to do some exploring closer to shore than we can go with the catamaran, since it is a lot shallower out of the  channel marked by the red and green buoys.  There's an old ship wreck about half way down the river from where we're staying and the exit of Rio Valdivia to the sea.  This ship was washed ashore during the major earthquake in 1960 that sunk the whole Valdivia basin by about two meters.  It was too big to raise and move out of the channel so the markers have been placed to route the traffic around it.  Here you can see some cormorants have built nests atop the masts on the sunken ship.

The cormorants are everywhere here.  They dive for fish in the river near our marina too and then they climb out on a log or, in this case, a part of the shipwreck that sticks out of the water to dry their feathers.

 Along the way to the shipwreck, we investigated a place that we were wondering what it was every time we came by it on the way up the river.  We thought it was a mining operation because there always seemed to be a boat there loading or unloading something.  When we got close to it, we could see that it was a fish farm.  They raise salmon here and then load them into the trucks.  In this picture, you can see one of the trucks and the yellow hose that they suck up the fish with to load into the trucks.

In this next photo, you can see the barge they use to carry the trucks that the fish are in to market.  It's quite an operation and there are many fish farms here in Chile.  In fact some of the cruisers down here are complaining that all of the good anchorages are being taken up by the fish farms.

Today, Heather and I took the dinghy out for a spin and went the other way up the river towards Valdivia.  I practiced rowing the dinghy instead of using the motor to see how it goes without the motor.  I was very impressed with the maneuverability of the dinghy and am glad it works so well because if we need to pull the the ropes ashore to tie to trees from the aft deck, we may need to do it with oars to prevent the ropes from getting in the props.  Heather and I found a place down stream where a small row boat was hidden under some branches on a rocky beach about 30 feet long so we landed there to investigate.  There was a trail heading up through the forrest so we followed that for about a quarter of a mile to see where it went.  Unfortunately, it was a bit steep for Heather and kind of slippery too so she went back to the dinghy to wait for me while I continued to explore.  About 100 yards farther up the trail, I met some guys headed down the trail with fishing gear so I turned around too and went with them because I didn't want Heather to be left alone.  Those guys said they usually catch good fish right there so we may have to try it if we can get some fishing gear.

As we were sitting around the table watching Les Miserables on our computer from a CD, Jay surprised us by whipping up this crepe with nice frosting and raspberry jam on it.  It tasted fantastic, and as you can see, it looked very good too.  Jay's really good at making things from scratch.  

Tomorrow we should learn what the solution is to getting new springs for our injector pump on our starboard diesel engine.  If it's going to take a few days, we may rent a car and head north to investigate some of the lake area of Chile.  

That's all for tonight.

Escape Expedition 19 April 2013
Since my last post my wife Elaine and daughter Heather have joined Jay and I down here in Valdivia.  They flew in to Puerto Montt, which is about two and a half hours south of here via rental car or eighteen hours via boat.  They flew into Puerto Montt because that's where we thought we would be by now.  So Jay and I rented a car and took a leisurely drive down to Puerto Montt.  On the way down there we drove out on the point of land near Fruitillar to view one of the big lakes and some of the volcanoes.  Southern Chile has a string of huge lakes that are ringed with resort towns with hot springs, fed by the volcanos.  They look very European because many of the early settlers are from Germany.  Here are some pictures of the volcano by the lake at Fruitillar:

Many places kind of remind you of traveling in Switzerland or some quaint European town, like the picture of the barn above with the lake and volcano in the background, only in Switzerland, I guess it would be a mountain instead.
Elaine and Heather were beat by the time they got here because they had been flying or sitting at airports for over 24 hours.  So we didn't take them on the tour around the point out by the lake at Fruitillar, but headed straight back to Valdivia so they could get on the boat, get cleaned up, and get some rest.  Elaine hopped right in the shower, but Heather found her spot at the table on the bridge deck where she could look at her books or color.  They had already eaten on the plane so Jay just cooked up some local  sausages on the grill and made a caesar salad including the dressing from scratch.  It was awesome!  I decided to keep the rental car one more day so we could drive to Niebla, a town seventeen kilometers away that is very scenic and has the best fish soup ever.  It has lots of oysters, squid, fish, crab claws, clams, etc. in it and tastes great.  Heather and I split a bowl of the soup and Elaine and Jay each had their own bowl.  Here are a couple of pictures from the restaurant and beach front at Niebla—which means fog, because it is foggy there a  lot.

Earlier in the day Jay took Elaine and Heather in to town for a tour while I stayed on the boat to oversee some of the work going on.  The next day, we turned the rental car in and were again dependent on the local bus service.  Bus #20 comes by our marina about every ten minutes so the wait is never long.  Here's the reliable Bus #20 that we all take to town and back.

The next morning, Heather and I went on a hike around the marina while Elaine rested up.  We hiked up to the the marina club house, which we decided was "our secret place" because only we knew about it (see the picture below).  It's up a couple big flights of stairs so it was a real adventure for Heather.  

Then we hiked over to the the adjacent marina where Heather took this picture of me by this giant anchor.  We decided this anchor was much too big for our boat so we just went down on the dock to chat with some of our new friends there.  We met a guy named Steve who runs expeditions down to South Georgia Island and to Antarctica.  You can see his web page at 

http://www.xplore-expeditions.com/.  He's a very experienced Captain and was celebrating just buying out his other partners so now he owns the boat himself.  Jay and I went over to his boat that night to have a few beers and some barbequed chicken and sausages.  Elaine and Heather declined to go and chose to stay on the boat to rest.  

The next day Jay and Elaine went into town on the bus to look around while Heather and I stayed on the boat to get some things done.  Jay found these huge ears of corn:

So later that day we cooked them up with a chicken we had in the refrigerator and made some toast from local bread that we bought to go with the meal.  

Earlier in the afternoon, Elaine was feeling ambitious so she took the shower curtains down that Jay and I had put up and hemmed them up.  They were too long and were dragging on the bottom of the shower.  She went out on the back deck of the boat where she had a great view of the river and some cormorants that were sitting on a partially submerged tree.  

Yesterday, we awoke to another great sunrise (see picture below) and planned to go sailing later in the day.  Unfortunately, we discovered some problems with our starboard engine.  It hasn't been running well so I asked Alwoplast to check it out.  We discovered that the springs in the injector pump were broken.  A defect in the engine as it was delivered.  So, right now we're waiting on new springs or a new pump.  Since we can't sail tomorrow, we plan to take the dinghy around to explore some of the local islands in the river.  Well, that's it for tonight.  I'll update you again in a day or two on our progress.

Escape Adventures 15 April 2013:
We were without internet for a couple of days so I'll try to catch up now that we have it back.  Much to my chagrin, I've had to make some major changes to my itinerary plans.  I figured we had only about two weeks of sailing left down south because of the approaching winter and the Chilean Navy forecast, which is usually pretty good shows two huge storms right off the coast of where we wanted to go.  One is just a couple days out and the other is three days behind that and each one lasts about three days.
Here's a picture of the weather pattern we were looking at a couple days ago when we had to make the decision.

So, as the Captain of the boat, I had to decide what was best for my crew, the boat, and myself.  Being pretty inexperienced, I decided to not go south, but rather to finish fixing the few nagging things on the boat that need to be fixed before setting out on any long journey.  Our freezer, for example, gets plenty cold to freeze stuff right next to the cold plate, but a foot or two away, it's 8 degrees warmer and our frozen pizzas that we were storing up for the long trip are kind of limber.  So, Alwoplast is adding a channel in the freezer for the fan to better circulate the cold air when the compressor is running.  We'll have that fixed tomorrow.  The awning maker came by today with the cockpit awning and the awning that goes on the back deck.  They look great, but need a couple of adjustments so they fit tight.  Anyway, we think it's prudent to get all of those things fixed while we're still right here in port with the excellent support from Alwoplast, before we head out on a longer adventure.  Once all of these things are fixed, we will sail locally for a week or so and then head out.

We now have the SSB radio working very well.  Last night I was able to download a bunch of e-mails, a weather fax, and some other information we needed even though we didn't have Wi Fi.  I could transmit and receive both over the Chilean stations and one in Panama.  So, I think we can put the SSB issues behind us.  One of the guys who has been very helpful in solving these issues is John Yeamans, who lives on a boat just two berths down the dock from us.  John has been sailing for 40 years and knows a tremendous amount about electronic things as well as sailing.  He's been very helpful in teaching us how to use the SSB radio and how to get e-mails and weather reports.  He also helped us install a program for getting tides all over the world.  He's also been sailing with us and teaching us how to use our radars.  Here's a picture of John with an apparatus he made up from capacitors and other parts he had on his boat to reduce the RF noise on our SSB.  That thing worked great and significantly improved the performance of our SSB radio.

I had a couple more pictures of our trip up the Valdivia River towards Valdivia that I wasn't able to send in my last post so I'm including them here.  It's very scenic here as you can see and the people are very friendly.  There's quite a bit of industry along the river banks.  One area we passed was making wood chips from the local trees and loading them onto ships, I think bound for China.

We continue to eat like kings on the boat.  Sometimes we don't know for sure what we're buying in the grocery store because we don't speak very good Spanish, but when we get it back on the boat Jay is able to make something good out of it.  In this picture, he cut an avocado in half, baked it, and put scrambled eggs with ham and peppers in it.  It was delicious.  

I'm really a breakfast person and like to make pancakes, bacon and eggs for breakfast.  But you can't buy Busquick here in Chile so you have to make it from flour, baking powder, baking soda, etc.  We're still trying to find the ingredients.  You also can't find the nice neat packages of bacon like we have in every supermarket or 7-11 in the US.  A couple days ago we saw this big piece of pork belly that looked a lot like bacon, so I bought it, brought it back to the boat and sliced it up.  We decided to fry up a few pieces to see what it tasted like.  It was kind of like strips of pork chops—very good, but not bacon.  Jay said, it just wasn't cured so he rubbed rock salt into it and we're letting it cure in the refrigerator now.  Here's a picture of the sliced "bacon" and of Jay rubbing in the salt.

A couple days ago, I was still busy preparing for our departure to head south.  In this next picture I was rolling up one of the lines we intend to feed off of reels on the back of the boat to tie the aft end to shore in those places where we need to anchor very close to shore because in the fiords the depth drops off very rapidly.  Consequently, you have to anchor close to shore and keep the boat oriented toward the anchor as the tide, currents, and wind change.  The tides down here are  10 to 15 meters in some areas, so you have to really pay close attention.  In the other picture we're taking on diesel, Chilean style—no big tanker truck right up to the dock.  The tanker puts it in 55 gallon drums and then these guys brought the drums out on the dock to refuel my boat.

This morning it was very foggy, as it is most mornings, and pretty cold.  It's beautiful though, and very peaceful.  Here are a couple of shots of the early morning fog as the sun begins to peak through.

In this final shot, you get to see  what I see out the window as I stand in front of the stove making breakfast each morning.  I love this place.  It's like having your own log cabin on the bank of a nice lake, but you can move your cabin whenever you get the urge for a change of scenery.

Tomorrow, Jay and I are taking a rental car south about three hours drive to pick up my wife Elaine and daughter Heather.  They flew into Puerto Montt because that's where we planned to have the boat by now.  It's only a two or three hour drive, but it takes 12-14 hours to get their by boat.  Anyway, they will be joining us here on Escape and we will take in some of the local sights while we clear up the remaining few problems and wait for a couple of things to come in from the US.  There are a lot of fantastic things to see—old forts, scenic hot springs, fiords and lakes, etc.  I will be sharing some of these with you in the next few posts as the adventure gets started in earnest.

Chan

Escape Adventures  11 April 2013

In the first post, I tried to give you an idea of what the boat was like.  In the second I attempted to paint a picture of what the local life in Valdivia, Chile was like.  In this post I will add a little to both of those and provide an overview of the adventure itinerary.

For the past three days it's been raining very hard with strong gusty winds.  The winds were over 20 knots here in the harbor at times, but out on the open seas it was 35 knots at times with 25 foot swells.  Not a good time to sail.  Fortunately, we had lots of work to do on our SSB radio, which besides our satellite  phone is our primary source of weather and e-mail when we're at sea or away from Wi Fi internet.  The problem has been that the feedback of radio frequency (RF) power radiated from the SSB antenna over all of the other wires has been interfering with our auto-pilot and some of the instruments. We spent three days tracing down the problems.  We pulled new wires through the conduits on the boat, put new copper ribbon grounding wires on, moved components around, replaced the antenna, and many other things.  We finally solved the problem earlier today and have now been able to download weather reports and e-mails so we believe that problem is behind us.  I've been able to broadcast as far as Panama from here in Valdivia, Chile so we have plenty of range.

We filled the fuel tanks today and tomorrow we will fill up the water tank and get a few more groceries to prepare for the first leg of the journey.  From Valdivia, wich is at about 39˚ 50' S,  we intend to go farther south about 120 nautical miles to Puerto Montt, which is at about  42˚ S.  It's in a huge bay, kind of like the San Francisco Bay, but about 150 miles long and 50 miles wide.  This stretch of ocean is notoriously treacherous, and nicknamed the the roaring forties, so it's important to pick a period with good weather.  The forecast right now shows good weather for several days starting Saturday so we plan to go then.  Puerto Montt is right at the north end of that bay.  My wife and daughter plan to meet us in Puerto Montt.  From there we intend to sail south through a series of islands, farmlands, and fishing villages, and then cross over the bay and visit two picturesque fiords.  We had originally intended to spend more time down there, but winter is rapidly approaching here in southern Chile and we dare not linger.  Even now, it's very cold at night.  The mornings are usually foggy and it frequently rains.  But when the sun comes out, it is beautiful here and we're hoping we get a couple of weeks with good visibility down south.

I've been running the diesel heaters early in the morning to take the chill off as we prepare breakfast and prepare for the day ahead.  As you can see from the two pictures below, the bridge deck is pretty comfortable and if we have to sail from inside the bridge deck, we can.  I suspect much of the sailing around the fishing villages and in the fiords will be by motor because the room for maneuver is limited, but very scenic.

A couple of weeks ago, we took escape up the river to the Valdivia Fish Market.  The navigable channel is pretty narrow in spots and along many parts of the shore, there were people working or playing who stopped to look at our boat as we went along, and they cheered and waved at us.  When we finally got just adjacent to the fish market, which is about in the middle of town, we could not go any farther because there is a bridge across the river that is too low to go under.  So with one engine in forward and one in reverse, I did a 180˚ turn,  the people at the fish market cheered and we hoisted the sails and went back down the river.  Here's are a couple of pictures showing what it was like going up the river to Valdivia.

Along the river we saw this old submarine with two gigantic sea lions on it.  Well, one was on it and the other one was trying to get on it.  These were huge sea lions that must have weight over 600 pounds.

 There was another gigantic sea lion on the dock right in front of the fish market where we did our turn around maneuver.

Not all days are as fun as these.  Some days we have to stop what we're doing and take advantage of the sunshine to do our laundry.  I bought  a funnel shaped thing on a stick that was advertised as a hand washing machine.  You put your dirty clothes in a 5 gallon bucket of hot water and soap and use it like a plunger to force the water through the clothes and to rotate them around.  It works really well.  Then I throw them in the bottom of the shower to rince them off and hand wring them before hanging them on the lifelines around the deck.  Here's a picture of the laundry hanging out to dry.  The trick is to make sure you have a good grip on them when hanging them up or taking them down, because if you drop something, it's gone.

We've been eating very good once we got pots and pans and enough utinsels to cook with.  Jay is a fantastic cook and can make just about anything from scratch.   After we cooked some hamburgers on the stove, he used the ingredients left in the pan as the base to make some onion soup.  It was delicious. Here's a picture of the onion soup and of Jay cooking some local Valdivian sausages on the BBQ on the back deck.  

It's getting late now and I have much to do tomorrow to get ready to go south.  I'll try to send a movie or two in the e-mail announcing the update to this blog.

Chan

Escape Expedition 5 -8 April 2013

In the first post, I tried to give you an overview of our boat Escape and some of her most prominent features and capabilities.  I'll add more to that in the next post, but in this post I wanted to give you a flavor of what it's like in Valdivia, Chile where the boat is being made.  My son Jay and I have been living on the boat since 15 March and it's now 8 April.  We had a rental car for the first week or two, but once we made a lot of trips to the local hardware, department, and grocery stores to get basic supplies to equip the boat with things like dishes, linnens, blankets, pots and pans, fuel and water cans, tools, electrical tape, etc., we turned in our rental car and just started using the local bus service like the local folks around here.  Bus number 20 runs past Alwoplast where we have the boat anchored about every ten minutes and goes to most of the places in Valdivia where we need to go.  It costs about a dollar to ride the bus.  I'll get a picture of the bus the next time we ride it so you can see what it looks like.

This is really a cool town.  It has lots of really good restaurants.  They have awesome sea food and there is a heavy German influence here.  There are two crafts microbrewries (Salsberg and Kuntzmann) within walking distance of where we are.  We ate there a lot when we first got here, but the last couple of weeks we're eating most of our meals on board.  Jay is an awesome cook.  Here's a picture of one of his sandwiches.  It was made with one of the local Valdivia sausages, cheese, tomatoes, and other good stuff.  The beer is from Kuntzmann right down the street.

It's usually quite chilly in the mornings and it doesn't get light until about 8 AM.  Here is a picture of what it looks like early in the morning.

We usually run the diesel heaters when we first get up to take the chill off the air while we make breakfast and prepare for whatever work is being done on the boat that day.  A couple of days ago we saw a Chilean Navy boat pull up to the dock at the end of our pier and we saw the owner of Alwoplast running down from the shop to meet it.  We saw a couple officers step off and a lot of pointing at us and lots of hand waving and then Alex Wopper (the builder of our boat) brought the two officers and another gentleman over to our boat and asked to come aboard.  Of course we said yes and thought we might have done something wrong during one of our sea trials.  It turned out the third gentleman was Manuel Cofré (Governor of the region), the ranking officer was Admiral   Osvaldo Schwartzenberg (Commander of the Region), and the third guy was CPT De Corbetalt (Port Captain of Valdivia).  They were doing inspections of the area and asked Alex Wopper if they could see our boat since it is somewhat unique.  So we took the opportunity to show them around and to demonstrate how to operate the mast foils.  Here is a picture of the Admiral, the Captain and Alex Wopper with me on the back deck of Escape.

In town, you see stray dogs everywhere.  Many of them look like they haven't been getting much grub so we give them a handout when we can.  This one particularly caught my eye because he had two eyes of different colors.  It reminded me of the story "Little House on the Prairie".  In that story, they had a dog named Jack and he had eyes like that.  They came across a band of hostile indians one day, but the indians left them alone because they believed such a dog had special powers.  This dog's powers was to bark at any other dogs that came into his territory.

It's hard to find a lot of the things we just take for granted in the U.S.  For example, I needed to find some wooden plugs in case one of the through hull fittings on the boat springs a leak while we're at sea.  So, I took a break from other work, cut a few chunks out of a limb on a tree and sat up above the harbor for an hour or so while I whittled three different sized wooden plugs and stowed them in my maintenance bag.  Here's the whittling spot.

In order to provide some means of transportation during our adventure, we bought a couple of folding mountain bikes.  They're awesome.  They're almost as good as my mountain bike at home with front end suspension and lots of gears.  They run really smoothly and are easy to pedal.  A couple days ago, Jay and I took a ride along the road above the river towards Niebla.  Here's a shot of Jay at one of the pullouts along the river.  It's very scenic here.  We also saw this cool water wheel along the road.  We haven't taken any more rides though because it's pretty treacherous.  The roads don't have a shoulder and there are quite a few really narrow places where the road goes across bridges.  Most cars give you a little room, but when there is a bus coming each way, there's not much room for you.  I figured if I wanted to become an old adventurer, I better wait until I get somewhere where the roads aren't quite so busy or the cars go slower to ride my bike.  Since then, we've been walking or riding the bus.

Well, that's about it for tonight.  It's getting time to go to bed.  We need to get up in time to get breakfast overwith before the electrician gets here around 8 AM to finish wiring up the SSB radio in the new location we picked for it.  I hope you all are enjoying this adventure.  I think it will get a lot better once we get the remaining few technical problems worked out and get under sail.  I'll add a few more pictures of the boat in the next log.