Where to Next...

Climbing down from Leadville, leaving a fabulous 18-year career at HMI, and heading off to sea required a sturdy goal both to inspire us and to keep us focused. That goal was to cross the Atlantic Ocean on our own boat. That done, now what?

We have spent a lot of time considering just this. Broadly we are interested in visiting places like the Lofoten Islands in Norway, the fjords of southern Chile, Patagonia, and maybe Greenland. Of course theses places are all on the far side of nowhere, near what the young crew on Sila call either the land of polar bears or the land of penguins. But it is an impossible race for us to actually chase summer from the Northern to Southern Hemisphere in any single year, so we must choose.

Some people look at the YouTube videos of the round the world sailors bashing along and are inspired. I am a little bit... but mostly I think how miserable it looks. I love remote places, value self-sufficiency, and have an abnormal affinity for the bottom end of the thermometer. However, I take great pride in being a lazy scaredy-cat who seeks the maximum benefit for the absolute minimum effort and minimum drama.

Hardship for its own sake is for gluttons and "epics" are for learning how not to make the same damn mistakes over again. I will take my pain with a purpose please, never mindlessly. (Aside: from the above, one can see why I never understood my spouse's need to complete a dozen 100 mile runs. After the first, I got the point and didn't need the reinforcement of repetition.)

So a rather deep look at possible routes and seasonal weather patterns was in order. An informal but brilliant and sexist heuristic for cruisers is "gentlemen don't sail to windward." Given this and a recognition that slavishly following the rules never really works out, we have created a tentative plan.

We'd love to head north along the eastern seaboard to see friends and family, and then explore far north around Newfoundland and beyond. The problem is the return trip south would mean a half year in the tropics, of which we have almost had enough already. Another option would be to sail for the Azores and then Scotland to Norway this spring, but that would set us up to repeat the last six months in a year's time and we want to see new places.

This does leave one tantalizing, albeit audacious, option: a counterclockwise circumnavigation of the South American continent. This is a vague plan. It is subject to change. I outline it here to give an initial direction but not actually a destination, because at sea one never knows where you will end up and excessive attention to meeting a schedule is perilous.

We will spend March in the Bahamas, April in Florida sorting the boat out for another year afloat, and then it looks to be a nice sail to Panama in May and then a slow but downwind'ish one to the Galapagos in July.

The fly in the ointment is the Galapagos to Puerto Montt, Chile. The direct route is dead to windward on the eastern side of a South Pacific high (apparently the weather and toilet bowls spin the other way down there...), against the Humbolt current, and along a desolate coast with few viable stops. This collectively is a recipe for weeks of diesel-burning, motor-sailing, misery.

One solution is to head southwest from the Galapagos for a long while then hang a left once we hit the westerlies south of about 35 degrees south. This adds about 2,000 nm of sailing but at least it would be sailing. Zooming in the chart, one sees a group of small islands en-route, making for an atypical stop - the Easter Islands, aka Stone-hedge of the south or more likely Stone-hedge is the Easter Islands of the North...anyway... We are thinking we will sail over for a visit then swing beneath the southern Pacific high that lives off the coast of northern Chile. No self respecting grand adventure can really be considered "grand" without at least a few stone monoliths to contemplate.

We'd arrive in Chile very early (too early really but so it goes) in the austral Spring, late August or early September, giving us a month or so to explore inland and to get ready. Then we will head south through the channels and fjords of southern Chile to the Beagle Channel for October to January.

February might find us heading out to the Falklands and/or South Georgia. The latter eats up a lot of westing, which would make the return north a challenge in exchange for seeing oceans of penguins nesting. Then north on the eastern side of South America, maybe we'll party in Rio for Carnival but only if they have O'douls....

That would be a year's sail, about 13,000 miles, and should keep us entertained if not totally maxed out. It might be too much but there is only one way to find out for sure.

After that, who knows what we will do. Maybe we will go over to Scotland, then Norway, returning either south again via the Canaries or possibly a late summer Viking crossing... or... up the eastern seaboard to circumnavigate Newfoundland or....Who knows... That plan can wait for another pithy post in a year's time...

- Christopher