Escape Expedition 8 June 2013—Stay in Valdivia extended:
By this time I had hoped to be reporting about our passage to the Galapagos Islands and on some of the fauna there, but alas we're still here in Valdivia.  We were scheduled to depart on 1 June along with our sister boat "Pounce", the second boat in the Atlantic 47 series.  Preparations were in full swing and on 29 May, I was in the Alwoplast hangars coordinating the delivery of fuel, departure permits (called zarpas), etc. when all the lights went out.  It took me a while to find my way out of the building and back down to the dock and when I got there, Jay was standing out on the dock and said all of our electronics had just failed.  We don't really know if it was a lightening strike, a near miss, or a power surge over the shore power that caused it, but our whole electronics suite was shut down.

We went back on board and I attempted to restart our Lithium Ion battery bank, which is the heart of our DC electronic system on the boat.  Fortunately for us it started right up with no apparent problems, but clearly there had been some kind of power spike that caused both of the large relays that are in the system to protect those Li Ion batteries to shut down.  So, one by one, we started bringing our systems back on line.  Luckily our broadband radar, both our Single Side Band and VHF radios, and most of our displays were all OK, but our wind sensor at the top of the mast, our auto-pilot computer, the speed sensor, the depth sensor, and three of our seven displays were damaged and not operational.  Well we couldn't head out on a passage to the Galapagos without those instruments so we set about trying to reprogram them hoping that just their memories or software had been upset, but no such luck.  Next we tried to substitute a Raymarine auto-piot computer for our Navico computer, but it wasn't compatible and couldn't talk to the rest of the system.  We spent the next couple of days talking to the Navico reps on the phone to see how fast we could get replacements but no matter how badly we wanted them, it was clear that it was going to be about a week and a half at least before they would get here.  So we had to sit here tied to the dock and watch Pounce leave during the first reasonably good weather window we had seen in weeks.  Pounce departed about 1 PM on Monday, 3 June and made a little over 200 miles per day for the first couple of days.  We got a report each morning as to their progress and the status of the weather, sea state, etc.  They had to motor or motor sail for the first day and night against light head winds and then started picking up westerly and southwesterly winds so that they could go under just sail power.  The experienced over 30 knot winds with 20 foot seas so it was pretty rough going, but the boat did well with just minor chafing of one of the control lines on the forward mast foil.  Chris White, the designer of the boat, was planning on sailing the first three or four days with us, but once we lost our navigation electronics, he jumped on board with Pounce and went with them.  He also gave us a few things to watch for as we follow them north out of here.

Well since we were hunkered down here, we continued to make preparations starting with putting on our light air sail.  We got a break in the weather a few days ago so we brought it on board, raised it and furled, it lowered it, and stowed it below in the starboard forepeak.  It's a big sail and I think once we get about 400 to 600 miles north of here, we will get really good winds out of the southeast that will carry us all the way to the Galapagos and we should get some good use out of that sail then.  Here's a picture we took of Pounce with her identical light air sail, called a screecher, deployed.  It's not quite filled out in the picture as the winds that day were very light.  You can see from the picture though that it is significantly larger than the conventional jib.

In order to get our screecher up we had to add a three or four foot carbon fiber bowsprit to the front of the boat.  It attaches to the cross beam between the two bows with a pin through the seagull striker as shown in the picture below.  Sven, then got in a row boat and went to the front of the boat to attach lines through holes in the two bows that hold down on the bowsprit once we fasten the screecher to it at the eye in the front of the bowsprit and tighten it with the halyard to the top of the mast.  You can see one of the two blue lines in the pictures below.

While we've been waiting for our replacement electronics to arrive we took advantage of that time to fix a small leak we discovered around one of the through hull fixtures in the starboard engine compartment.  To fix it, we had to raise Escape out of the water with Alwoplast's huge crane.  It's a reasonably simple fix, once the boat is out of the water, but not everyone has such a crane that can lift a 47' catamaran out of the water.  I posted a video of the lift on You Tube at http://youtu.be/PIDlQZLuBZE so you can see the process and here is a still photo of Escape while it is hanging from the hoist.  Once the repair was made, we needed to let it dry overnight so Jay and I spent the night dangling on the hoist.  It was a good sleeping night because there weren't any waves to rock the boat every time a fishing boat or barge went down the river, and no fenders banging on the sides of the hull.  In the second picture, you can see Leo in the rowboat beneath Escape taking out the through hull fitting so we could sand the surface inside to make it a tighter fit.  It turns out Leo's parents live in one of the houses on the other side of the small Island I showed you a movie of in one of the previous posts where I pointed out from the dinghy ride.  His dad is one of the fishermen we see out here every once in a while.  Leo just finished engineering school in December, but he's been working here at Alwoplast for about ten years.

While they had Escape up on the hoist, Jay and I went in to town to do some shopping and to get some lunch.  We almost always get off at the first bus stop so we can walk through central park.  It's a pretty park and I like seeing the people there and all of the stray dogs looking for a pat on the head and a handout.  On the way from the bus stop to the park, we usually walk on Libertad Street.  It's just for walking so no cars can go on it and it goes all the way from the fish market down by the river to central park.  Here are a few pictures of Libertad Street and one of the Central Park.

 

We didn't buy too much stuff because we figured we would be hiking around town most of the day while they worked on the boat on the hoist.  We found a great little cafe called the Picamaderos or Woodpecker.  We ordered a great big Ceasar Salad which we shared and a dozen shrimp empanadas plus a couple of beers.  I like the milder beers so I ordered the Kunstmann Lagar but Jay likes the stronger beer so he ordered the Stout.  After we had lunch we headed back to the park and stopped by the Palace Cafe on the way to check our e-mail  to see if our parts were on their way yet—not yet it turned out.  The Palace Cafe is one of our favorite coffee shops—it has great coffee and free internet.  Sometimes we go in there if the internet is down at the marina.  It's a good place to hang out.

On the way back from the mall towards the park we came across this guy standing on the sidewalk with a cap pistol strapped to his hip.  I'm not sure what he was there for, but everytime a car would go by, he drew his pistol and fired a couple of caps at them.  I couldn't help but think what would happen to that poor guy in the U.S.  In LA they would call out the whole SWAT team, get a helicopter overhead, have him surrounded by cops, get some ambulances on the scene, and evacuate everyone from all of the stores in the mall as a starter.  The guy would probably get shot and not even know he was committing a crime.  Anyway, here is a picture of the guy with his pistol drawn.  Down here, no one seemed to pay any attention to him, and he didn't seem to have a beef about anything, he was just having a little fun.

As we walked around town I also found a few more graffiti pictures worthy of note.  I showed you a few in my previous posts, so here are a few more to add to the collection.  I'm not sure who draws these or what the message is on all of them.  Some are pretty obvious and some are not.  Sometimes you have to stare at these things for a while because they look like they were painted by someone with red wires hooked up to blue connectors inside their brains.  For example, look at the second picture of the person with a chameleon on it head and the person's left eye is also the eye of the chameleon.  I don't think if I doodled on a drawing pad all day, I would come up with anything like that.  Other pictures are more realistic like the person in the third picture wearing traditional Mapuche Indian headdress and outfit.

When we got back to the marina, they were finished fixing the through hull fitting, but the boat had to stay out of the water for the night so we just hopped aboard and put our groceries away and went back out to see what else was happening at Alwoplast.  We found our friend Julio working on the dock trying to repair a spot where the plastic strips had been worn or lost around the pilings.  We were glad to see him fixing that because those plastic sleeves make it a lot quieter at night when the piers are banging against the pilings.  Julio is a great guy, as are all of the workers here at Alwoplast.  We've gotten to know them pretty well during the 3 months we've been here and they've taken me into their shops to show me their equipment and how they do stuff.  They're very proud of their work, and they should be.  They're hard working and very skilled at what they do.

After talking to Julio for a few minutes, I went up to the hangars and peeked inside.  I like walking around in there to see what's being worked on now.  Inside I saw  the solar taxi below that Alwoplast makes.  It was in there to get a fresh coat of antifouling bottom paint and some new paint on the Kunstmann sign on the side.  They had moved one of the hulls for Atlantic 47 #4 outside where people were sanding it and getting it ready to connect to the other hull as soon as it is done.

Well, my friends, that's my report for now.  Not a lot has happened.  We continue to get ready to get out of here and head north.  Hopefully we will be able to do that next weekend.  In the mean time, we're supposed to have a couple days  of good weather so maybe we will get to go out and try out our new sail.  

Chan

'Escape' needs a courier to bring supplies to Chile. If you or someone you know who is trustworthy would be willing to transport some electronics and other critical items to our sailboat we might be willing to pay for your transport to Chile. Additionally if you would like to join us on our sail to Galapagos and up the Mexican coast to Baja, you would have free room and board while aboard the sailboat. There will be lots of opportunities for sailing, hiking, biking, diving, sightseeing etc. Don't miss this once in a lifetime opportunity!

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Escape Expeditions 23 May 2013
This post will add to some of the processes we've described earlier regarding the building of the Atlantic 47 series of catamarans and will bring you along on some of our local adventures and events in the Valdivia area.  We continue to be entranced by the beauty of the local area and by the people who are so friendly and welcoming to us.  We haven't been on anymore overnight anchorages since our last post, mostly because of the weather, but we have been out to sail a couple of times to test some modifications to the mast foil controls.  Even though we've been here since the 15th of March living on the same boat in the same marina, it's still really pleasant because it's so peaceful and it looks different each day as the weather changes.  Here are a couple of shots from Escape as it looked yesterday morning.

There's also always some activity going on, whether it's from the wildlife in the area, such as cormorants diving to catch a fish or sitting on local trees to dry out their plumage, or the local fishermen such as in the photos below.  In the first picture, the guy motoring across the river had just been fishing off to the right.  He spread out a big net with small floats on it and then flailed the water with a big rope with a knot on the end to scare the fish towards the net.  Then he pulled the two open ends together and hauled in the net.  From where I was watching, it didn't look like he caught anything, but I've seen others in the same area come back to the docks with quite a few fish.  The other boat in the background in the first picture and in the second picture seemed to be his partner because I could hear them talking back and forth as they moved to a better spot.  We observed the fishing boat was going straight across the river to the small island on the other side so we decided to lower the dinghy and follow him to see where he went.  I posted a movie of the dinghy ride at http://youtu.be/VJ6qQLXORKc.  The water is so smooth that in the first part of the movie, it doesn't look like we're moving, but we are.  Anyway, on the other side of the small island in the movie, there is a cluster of houses and the smoke you see above the island is smoke coming from the chimney of one of those houses.

 Another landmark that has caught my eye as I move around Valdivia on the bus or on foot is the graffiti.  It's not just some gang putting their logo on the wall to mark their territory, it seems to be  telling a story about some part of the local life and the struggles they go through.  Here are a couple of examples.  I saw some of this in Ecuador when I was there a couple years ago as well.  There are some areas that are devoted to school children depicting their favorite animals in Mindo, Ecuador and we see some evidence of that here too.  My wife, Elaine, was particularly interested in the graffiti here and took a lot of pictures to write about later.

On the 20th of May, we heard a banging on the hull of the boat and it was Alex, who heads up Alwoplast Corporation here in Valdivia, and he had  Navy Admiral (two star) Felipe Garcia-Huidobro and a Captain with him and wanted to come aboard to look at Escape.  Of course we invited them on and gave them a tour and an explanation of the unique features of this catamaran.  The admiral is responsible for all of the maintenance of the Chilean fleet and the Captain is the local Governor.  The Governor had been on our boat before when he came aboard with Admiral Schwartzberg a couple weeks ago.  At the end of the tour, the Governor turned to Alex and said, "You should bring these two gentlemen with you to the Naval Glory Days Parade".  I'm not sure if Alex was planning on going to the parade or not because he's really jumping through hoops trying to get the second in the Atlantic 47 series ready to go.  Anyway, Alex assured the admiral that it was a great idea and told us to meet him in his office at 11 AM the next day so we did.  

The next day at 11 AM we all hopped in Alex's Mercedes (the couple from Bomika, the boat behind us, Jay and I, and Alex) and sped off to Valdivia.  Alex took a few back roads and explained that there would be no parking downtown because of the parade so we were going to park on the other side of the river, take one of the solar taxis (river boats built by Alwoplast that are propelled by solar power) across the river and land right at the reviewing stand where we would have reserved seats.  We parked at the museum we had gone to when Elaine was here and walked down the stairs where the river taxis were and the men who ran the operation welcomed Alex like a long lost brother.  We hopped on one of the taxis and headed across the river.  Here's a couple pictures of the solar powered river taxi.  In the first picture, you can see that it can hold 10 to 15 people and you can see the solar panels on the roof.  It was totally foggy and drizzling so we weren't getting much solar power, but the boats are plugged in when not on a mission.  On board the boat are Charlie and Lisa from the boat Bomika, Alex, and Jay.  The second shot is out the window toward the Fish Market across the river.  The reviewing stand is just to the right of the Fish Market.  

For the Naval Glory Day Celebration, the Navy had tied one of their boats and an old submarine to the dock right behind the reviewing stand.  Here are a couple of pictures of the old submarine as we got off of the solar taxi to walk up the stairs to the reviewing stand.  I also posted a movie on You Tube of the river taxi ride at http://youtu.be/xQP-O3OWobI and you can see the Navy ship and the old submarine in that movie as well.

Once we got up the stairs, Alex went under the rope to keep the crowds at bay and found our seats in the covered stands.  It was nice that it was covered because it was drizzling all during the parade.  From my West Point and Army days, I could relate to the poor troops who were standing out in the rain thinking what a bunch of toads we were standing under the tent looking at them getting drenched.  Here are a few still shots of the festivities.  The first is of me and Alex in the reviewing stands and the next couple are of Admiral Garcia-Huidobro  reviewing the troops.  In Chile, it's OK if the Admiral's wife joins him in reviewing the troops and she appeared to be thoroughly enjoying herself.

I also posted a video of a portion of the ceremony on You Tube at http://youtu.be/w8AJwI4AOw0 for those of you who like such things.  I took a few more stills of some of the major events as best I could understand them throughout the ceremony.  This first picture was of a couple of dignitaries who went forward to be recognized by the Admiral.  I'm not sure what they did to warrant such recognition or what their jobs were, but their uniforms and helmets were sufficiently different and unique that I thought it was worthy of taking a picture.  The second picture below is of the color guard.  Notice the amazing metal necklace worn by the national flag bearer.  I asked Alex what the significance of that was, but he didn't know either.  It was impressive though.  The third picture is of a real hero.  He jumped in the water and saved eight people from drowning so he definitely deserved an award from the Admiral.

At the end of the ceremony, the troops went through a few drills including fixing their bayonets, presenting arms, and singing the national anthem.  Overall, I thought they did a great job and although, in the picture of me and Alex in one of the pictures above it looks like no one came, by the end of the parade, the place was crowded and the stands were full of people.  There were probably two or three thousand people along the streets and in the stands, and given that the weather was so bad, I think it showed a great deal of patriotism.  After the troops marched off, this dance group came out in the street and danced some of their native dances.  I posted a video of the dance on You Tube at http://youtu.be/Rju8aCZ6PUQ.  Notice in the movie that the local stray dogs are intermingling with the dancers and at least one of them is barking at them as if to say, "you are in my spot and would you kindly move on."  

Back at the marina, work continued on the Atlantic 47 fleet of boats being built.  Our boat, Escape, is the first in the series.  Number 2, named Pounce, was launched a few days ago and we moved out to an end slip so she could be close to the hangers so the crews had better access to her.  Here's a picture of Pounce and Escape sitting side by side with another motor catamaran named Molly that was also built by Alwoplast.  The owner of Pounce arrived in town yesterday along with two other seasoned sailors who will be his crew on the way back to Hampton, VA.  Two of their wives came too, but they plan to fly back while the men sail straight from Valdivia to Panama, through the canal and up to Hampton in an effort to beat the hurricane season.  They all came aboard Escape yesterday and we showed them some of the improvements we've made on our boat over the past couple of months and that they now are beneficiaries of since our boat is a prototype for the rest of the fleet.  I posted a couple of movies of Pounce as she was getting launched into the water and of her getting her masts put on.  You can see these at http://youtu.be/k9DHejP6sA0 and http://youtu.be/WsOfDEgPLTY on You Tube.  We invited them to sail with us while they wait for their boat to get finished and they all agreed that they would like to do it in order to get as much experience as they can with the rig before they set out.

Finally, we were also visited by Ken Koellings a few days ago.  He is the owner of boat #4 in the Atlantic 47 line.  Ken came on board and looked at all the improvements we have made as well.  His boat is being built right now.  In the first picture, you see one half of one of the hulls in the mold where they laid it out and that I showed you in previous posts.  You can see that the hull is already starting to separate from the mold.  So what they do is hold it in place with clamps, then raise the two sides up as in picture two below and bolt the two halves of the mold together.  They put glue in between the two halves and then they fiberglass the two halves together and add the reinforcing carbon fiber where necessary.  In the third picture you see the aft end of the mold and the two halves as they appear right now.  The slot between the two halves is propped open with bolts along the bottom of the hull and that part is fiberglassed together and reinforced.  The end product is then taken out of the mold, another hull is made and then joined together with the bridgedeck, and aligned to within 1 mm.  

Best Regards,

Chan

Escape Expedition 16 May 2013

There are two parts to this blog post.  The first is called, "The Attack of the Mold Monster."  The second is, "Exploration Continues".  I've mentioned to you several times how rainy it's been and that we never seemed to get a break in the weather.  Well a few days ago I went into Heather's room on the boat and lifted up the mattress and there was mildew starting to form on the matress cover.  I immediately went to the other bedrooms and checked and sure enough, there was mold or mildew on the other mattress covers as well.  Even though the mattresses are up on some special springs to allow air flow underneath, I guess if you make your bed every day, that nice tucking in of the covers around the edges keeps the air from flowing and after several weeks of rain, and condensation inside the boat was just what the mildew needed to get started.  So we went on the offensive immediately and took off all the sheets and mattress covers and put the tea kettle on to get really hot water.  I used a 5 gallon bucket that I have on the boat to wash everything in hot water, clorox, and soap.  I did it on the back deck with this amazing hand washing machine gizmo that Jay found on the internet.  I posted a video of me washing clothes with it on You Tube at http://youtu.be/UkEwb0B1f6c.   It saves your back, when doing the laundry and really circulates the clothes, or mattress covers around as you can see on the video.  We hung everything out on the lifelines around the boat, but as soon as we did, it started to rain again so I hung a line from one side of the bridge deck to the other inside the boat, hung everything on that, and turned the heaters and blowers on to try to dry everything.  Next, we took more hot water and clorox and wiped down the whole insides of the boat to kill any mold that might be getting started in the bilges, bathrooms, or any other place.  That wasn't the most fun I've ever had, but it's part of the adventure and something I'm told by the other boaters that's pretty common on boats, especially metal boats.  Now, we keep the hatches cracked even if it's raining to improve the air circulation and I run the heaters for a while each morning to dry out the boat.  I also prop up the mattress each day, one day I prop up the head of the mattress, the next day the foot, so it gets air circulation.  That seems to be working.  Since Elaine worked so hard helping me clear out the mold and mildew, I took everyone out to supper that night at Kuntsman's which is a pub and restaurant up the road about 3.6 miles.  She insisted on serving the beer though so I took this picture of her serving Kuntsman's finest lagger.

The next day was overcast and sprinkling off and on so we put all the mattress covers and dirty clothes in a bag and took it down town to the local laundry shop and turned it in for another wash before putting it back on the beds.  They don't really have do-it-yourself laundermats here in Valdivia so we had to leave it overnight and then go back the next day to get it.  Everything came back fresh and clean, but it was still a pain to pack it all a half mile or so from the laundry place to the bus stop.  Heather and Elaine waited on the boat practicing their water painting while Jay and I went to retrieve the laundry.  Later that night, Jay cooked this fantastic meal of BBQ chicken, grilled potato slices, and peppers.  It was really good and then we all sat around the table and watched the movie Tin Tin until the internet went out about half way through, so we hooked up the external hard drive and watched the movie War Horse.  It's a really good movie if you haven't seen it.  We have a hard drive that my son Chris got in Afghanistan that has over 400 movies on it and when he found out we were getting the boat, he sent us the hard drive thinking there would be long passages on the ocean when we might need to watch a movie, or two, or three.

The next day was Mother's day, and still rainy off and on so we took Elaine in to Valdivia to walk around town and to see the museum there.  The museum was closed, but we were able to walk around the museum grounds and look in the windows.  It's mostly about the various cultures that settled in the Valdivia area and the displays are distributed among several old houses.  Here's a picture of one of them.  There were carriages outside the buildings we could look at like the one below that Elaine and Heather are looking at, and the rooms inside were set up to look like they did a couple centuries ago when the inhabitants occupied these houses.  We could see the rooms through the windows as we strolled around the grounds.

 There were flower gardens around the museum too that we enjoyed looking at.  Here's Elaine with one bloom as big as her head.  From the museum grounds, which are on the high ground right beside the river, we could look across to the other side and see the Fish Market, which is the long flat building right beside the water with the bright colored roof, and the casino which is the high rise building in the background to the left of the Fish Market.

Since it was Mother's Day we also took Elaine to one of the local restaurants for coffee near the bus stop.  Here's a portrait of the owner of the coffee shop.  The coffee was great, the service was good, and we had a good time just sitting there contemplating this adventure.

 The next day, Jay and I stopped by the Fish Market and picked up this big salmon and Jay put it on the grill that night.  Since it was Elaine and Heather's last night on the boat, we invited some of our neighbors over for some of Jay's special broccoli soup and grilled salmon.  They brought some wine and we added our own bottle of wine so we had a great time talking about all the places they have been and some of the places we have been too.  The couple we invited are from Germany and they are spending the winter here after coming up from the south where we had originally planned to go.  They had the misfortune of having their boat blown up on the rocks down there and had the hull breached such that water poured in.  They spent last winter down near Port Williams at the very bottom of South America getting it patched up and now they're waiting to have final repairs made here.

Earlier in the day, I got to practice my wild life photography when I saw this bird that looked like a huge blue Jay land on the pier next to ours.  I put on my big 400 mm lens and went way out on the bow of my boat to get as close as I could.  Just as I snapped this shot, a big hawk landed right below this bird, but he didn't seem to be concerned.  I talked to the production manager Roni Klingenberg about this bird and he said it's a pretty rare bird and is some kind of a Martin.  He told me the name, but I forgot it already.  He said they are very shy and rarely seen, but this particular one lives near by and knows he's not threatened here so he comes to the marina regularly and fishes here.  He's a big bird about 12 inches high.

The next day, the 14th of May, Elaine and Heather left around 11:30 AM on a shuttle I had arranged to take them to Puerto Montt to catch their flight back to Santiago, then Mexico City, then home to LA.  It was a clear sunny day, so Jay and I cast off the lines and headed to sea to spend the night out at an anchorage away from the Marina.  On the way down the Valdivia River I took a movie so you could go along with us (virtually of course) and posted it at http://youtu.be/gPfRzWqXxD4 on You Tube.  What little wind there was on our way down the river was right on our nose so we were just motoring along at about 2400 rpm and 8.5 knots.  

Once we rounded the bend down by Niebla, however, and headed out to sea, the winds really picked up to over 20 knots.  The swells were around 10 feet high and we were cruising along at 9.5 to 10 knots going down wind.  I posted another video at http://youtu.be/_zKroF4TBEk so you can appreciate what it's like when the wind gets up to 20 knots.  If we can get those kinds of winds, we can cover over 200 miles a day.  We sailed out to sea about 2.5 to 3 miles and then went in a box pattern to get experience sailing in all directions to the wind.  Coming back toward Corral, of course the wind was pretty much on our nose so we had to tack at an angle to make headway back to port.  Even so, we were maintaining 9.5 knots most of the way.  We sailed past Colleta Amargos and Puerto Corral which both have ruins of old forts we wanted to look at the next day and we looked for anchor points as we went by on our way to Point Roma where we planned to spend the night at anchor.  We got there around 4:30 to 5 PM, dropped the hook in about 13 feet of water, and let out about 70 feet of chain and rode.  We cooked up some fantastic Chilean sausages on buns we had bought at the market the day before and settled in for a relaxing night.  Here's a picture of the anchorage site just south of Pt. Roma.  You can see a house just in the distance and some fishing boats in the foreground.  I posted a movie of this site on You Tube at http://youtu.be/lYA-tdwv0-Y   

It was really cold that night, around 41˚ F according to the instruments on the boat, but it was quiet and peaceful.  We were protected by the point from any winds from the north or west and the tides weren't nearly as large here as they were at our previous anchorage.  There was a small waterfall adjacent to the boat about a hundred yards away so we could hear that at night and it was very peaceful until about midnight we heard a loud metallic clanging, which we thought was something to do with the anchor system breaking.  We jumped out of our beds and ran up to the bridge deck with flashlights in hand and found that it was just a metal ring that had fallen off one of the dome lights in the ceiling and hit the table on the way down.  Wow, what a relief so we went back to bed and pulled the covers up over our heads.  The next morning we woke up as the sun was coming up and I went up to turn the diesel heaters on to take the chill off before getting dressed.  On the way back down stairs I turned the tea kettle on so I could make coffee in a few minutes.  As I looked out, I saw this scene below and some fishermen just going out to make their daily catch for the fish market, so I ran down the steps, put on my pants, jacket, and slippers and went out to take these shots.  

After a few minutes, the cabin was warming up, the coffee was perking, and I had finished brushing my teeth and shaving so I went back up to the galley and made this breakfast fit for a king.  It had some of the sausage from the night before, some fried potatoes, toast, coffee, and orange juice.  And as I was making it, I could look out the galley window to the view just below the breakfast plate.  Now that's how God intended man to spend his days I thought to myself.

Later in the morning, we hauled up the anchor chain and idled around the bay to our south.  The whole southern part of the bay is pretty shallow, around 12 to 13 feet so we just idled along at about 1200 rpm and 4.5 knots, looking at the scenery and waving at the fishermen as we went by.  We then proceeded north up past our anchorage site at Pt. Roma to Corral where they have some ruins of a big fort that we wanted to go ashore and see.  Just as we came into the harbor, the winds came up quite strong and the water got really choppy with about 1 foot waves.  We dropped the anchor in a kind of crowded spot, but far enough away that we wouldn't drift onto the docks or other boats that were also anchored.  We could see the fort across the bay as you see in the picture below, but I didn't feel comfortable putting the dinghy down in the choppy seas so I gave the order to haul up the anchor again and we motored out of the harbor, put up the sails and cruised around the bay we had just come up through.

The winds were 9.5 to 10.5 knots and we were going about 7.5 knots with the wind at an angle of about 45˚ off our nose.  That was a good angle to just keep sailing right up the Valdivia River back towards our marina, so that's what we did.  We made it about half way up the river at pretty good speed under sail, but then lost our wind and had to furl the sails and motor back to our dock.  This time we tied up to the end slip because Alwoplast was launching the second in the Atlantic 47 line and they needed the slip closest to shore where we had been tied up for the past couple of months.  

Well, that's the report for today.  We're supposed to have good weather for the next few days so we will try to do some additional exploring and will report on what we find—hopefully, no more mold and lots of sights and critters.