Just like any other resident of Earth, the reality of the past several months has been very different than we expected it to be. While waiting for the change of seasons to sail south into Patagonia, our plan for the southern hemisphere winter was to keep busy by exploring Chile and other South American countries by land, and to travel home to visit family and friends.
While sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic we tried to get off the boat every day for a walk
Instead, we’ve been sitting on Madrone while tied up to the marina dock. While the area around Valdivia is rich in natural beauty, we haven’t really been able to enjoy it because we’ve been avoiding travel and other people as much as possible. We’ve heard the town itself is lively – it’s a university town supposedly full of good restaurants and small breweries – but social distancing means that we haven’t been able to verify that. And the winter weather here is, to put it charitably, quite bad. Even by the standards of former Pacific Northwest residents, there’s plenty of rain.
Once we decided to join Alejandro, we worked like crazy to get Madrone ready to leave for a few months in Valdivia
All in all, we’ve been making the best of the situation. One of the bright sides is that we’ve had a chance to meet and get to know some very interesting people, all of whom have been more or less stuck in the marina with us. We’ve interviewed some of them, and we’ve gotten to know one Argentinian sailor, Alejandro, fairly well.
Starting to provision for 6 people for 4-5 weeks
When Alejandro asked if we would join him aboard NDS Evolution for the sail to the South Pacific, our initial reaction (believe it or not) was that we couldn’t do it. The Chilean border is still closed, so when we check out of the country we likely can’t come back until international borders reopen. And we’ve never left Madrone on her own for more than a single month – with the border closed it may be many months before we can return. The risk seemed too high.
Everyone sailing to French Polynesia aboard NDS Evolutionas was tested for coronavirus before departure- we were all negative. Yay!
But then we decided to look at the trip as an opportunity instead of a risk. The life-long dream of many sailors is to head to the South Pacific – this would be a good chance for us to accomplish that. And Alejandro’s boat is a lure by itself; it’s a fast, technologically advanced, and extraordinarily comfortable catamaran that has already been across the Atlantic several times and to Antarctica and back.
Pre-departure safety briefing with Nacha modeling the latest in survival suit fashion
The past week has been a mad rush of preparation but now we’ll be heading off in the next day or so, sneaking out in a narrow weather window before the next storm system rolls ashore. You can follow our progress in realtime here: https://my.yb.tl/ndsdarwin. And we’ll do our best to document our trip along the way.
We hope you follow along!
