[password] rachel25
[position] 54 42.698s 070 14.450w
[status] As close to the glacier as we can get! NE Arm of Seno Ventisquero
Well this is where we had lunch. Hope you can see it on google earth.
I will try to describe the scene but I will undoubtedly not do it justice.
We are in a circular bay at the head of Seno Ventisquero, a sound stretching 12 miles north from the Brazo Noroeaste del Canal Beagle.
The bright sunlight is reflecting off the vast ice cap to our North which covers the Cordillera Darwin. A great tongue of ice is flowing down the mountain and into the bay along a 2-300 metre front, a wall of ice, blue, grey, white, dazzling in the sun. Above it the river of ice rises in giant steps up onto the cordillera. The bay is full of ice. We have spent an hour gently pushing our way through brash ice and bergy bits, listening to the crunch and judder as the aluminium hull pushes them aside. Ithaka, the ice-breaker in the lead, with Beduin in her slipstream a few metres astern minimising the risk of damage to delicate gel coat.
Now Beduin and Ithaka are rafted together in the middle of the bay, as close as we can get to the ice front. Aleko (from Beduin) is out on his paddle board exploring bergy bits, Gen is at the top of Ithaka's mast taking photos, Ana is shaking the Pisco Sour in a cocktail shaker (well actually a plastic water bottle), chilled with 1000 year old ice which I am breaking up with a hammer. Occasionally there is a crack and a roar like thunder as another enormous piece of this ancient glacier slips into the water. We toast each other with Pisco Sour. It is the best Pisco Sour we have ever tasted. Then there is hot soup and bread in the cockpit followed by thick black coffee.
We are quiet, drinking in the beauty and the majesty of this wild, wild place.
We drift, rotating gently in unison with the ice around us, a stately dance, driven by unseen currents from the blue-green depths. We are not in control. The currents take us, as they do the ice, inexorably towards the sea. When we are released, we continue south, hoisting sails to catch the cool breeze flowing down from the cordillera. Some of our ice partners accompany us for a time but they all slowly dissolve, returning whence they came, a thousand years ago.
[END]