Port Williams
3rd January 2019
After being nourished by such a spectacle of natural beauty, we reach our safe haven; Port Williams. As the pilot book rightly warns sailors, there is very little English spoken in these parts. Being the only [limited] Spanish speaker, I take to the radio any time we are making contact with the authorities. Port Williams is a base for the Chilean Armada which meant we were to follow their precise orders as to where to position the boat (we are far too big to fit inside the Micalvi pontoon).
Once we dropped the hook everyone carried on with their respective duties, the workday becomes far more regimented when we are stationary, we grasp on to the modicum of normality found in working standard hours (0800 to 1800); the mundane aspects of life that we take for granted on land find a grateful home in this odd world of yachting. Ish and I were taken ashore to meet the agent and organise all the paperwork. Anyone who has been to these parts can appreciate the extent of bureaucracy when cruising these waters, it is unavoidable. The agent picked us up from the southernmost yacht club in the world and drove us a grand total of three hundred metres to the naval office. The officer dealing with our documents in the tiny office was obviously the son of the serving admiral whose giant portrait scrutinised the entire procedure from the wall at our backs. It quickly became evident that this whole town is simply a base for the small arm of the Chilean navy that operates in Antarctica, and that a family dynasty endures through the generations.
Once we finished up we asked the agent to take us around the town. “This is the school, this is the supermarket, this is the clinic” and so on. It took us a grand total of six minutes to circumvent the miniscule town, no signs of life in sight bar a few Baguales (wild horses) chasing each other through the dirt road. Walking through the unpaved street is and interesting experience in that there is not a single soul to be found, everything is boarded up in an attempt at fashioning some home-made double glazing using plywood against windows and doors. When the sky is grey it there is a below zero wind chill which penetrates through our foulies, and this is the middle of summer, the place is certainly not conducive to blossoming life.
There were some indications that the small cruise ships that pass this way en route to Antarctica stop here and offload passengers, two souvenir shops and a bar. Where possible, the owners of these institutions use their geographical gold coin to entice the scant numbers of foreigners into their places of business; everything had ‘southernmost’ written before it, after all we are in the town the takes the title of being the last front of civilisation at the bottom of the planet. The mini market served us well, even though it only receives a supply shipment once a week and has to serve the whole town.
One evening was spent at the Micalvi yacht club, which is an old half-sunken steam ship that remained perfectly intact and is visited by all the adventurers that pass this way, you must buy your beers or wine at the mini market if you want to enjoy some drinks as the yacht club is not manned. The main features of the bridge are still immaculate and all the yachtsmen that use the comfortable warmth of the lower saloon keep the place clean and share stories of braving Drakes Passage. A few smaller aluminium and steel sailing boats were docked here, mostly French sailors and a few Americans. Their stories make me want to come back here on a fifty-footer and sail the Drake on one of those boats, it would be an entirely different experience to the one that lies ahead.
Mike and our Antarctic guide Ashley flew in to Port Williams today on the 3rd and we set sail for the Horn tomorrow on the 4th of January, there has been so much discovery filling my cup that the fact that we are going to be passing Cape Horn and sailing to the coldest continent on the planet seems to have crept up on me. A magical land of unfamiliar beasts and inhospitable conditions is on the horizon, onwards to Antarctica!