Welcome Aboard! •
Welkom Aan Boord! •
¡Bienvenido Abordo!
Ever since I first heard the Buddha’s teachings, some three and a half years ago, I’ve fantasised about the idea of taking a couple of monks sailing. The Buddha and his monks and nuns dwelt in the forests of northern India, and the branch of Buddhism which resonates with me is the one which sticks closest to the life which he advocated: a life verging on the ascetic, with the monastic members of the community still camping out in huts…
During the past couple of weeks Mollymawk has been a-voyaging without her Second Skipper, the reason being that Caesar has been having fun elsewhere. To be exact, he’s been signed up to serve as mate aboard a famous expedition yacht called Northanger. After a fortnight of hard work, while he prepared the boat for her forthcoming voyage, he’s heading back to the glaciers once more, and this time he’ll be checking them out in the company of a trio of…
Mollymawk has just returned from a six week cruise amongst the ventisqueros, or glaciers, of the Beagle Channel. Most yachts make this round trip in a fortnight or less, but — well, as you know, we like to travel very slowly… We mollymawks like to have time to get to know the places that we visit but, truth to tell, one could spend six months and more on the ventisqueros circuit and still not see everything. For this post we’ve…
I used to think that bogs were rather drab and dismal places. They’re definitively damp, and nothing much grows there except… well, you know – boggy stuff. Some of that ‘stuff’ I identified tentatively as sphagnum moss, and the rest I dismissed as “some other kind of moss”. And who could possibly get excited about moss? Well, lots of people, as it turns out; and me too, eventually. It turns out that the flora of the Cape Horn National Park…
The wind blew hard from the south-west, driving up great waves. Not since they left the northern hemisphere had the ship ridden seas this big – but far from being afraid or dismayed her captain was ecstatic. During the months that she had spent on the coast which we now know as Argentina the Endracht had seen plenty of strong winds, but always before the adjacent land had provided a lee. Now, evidently, there was no lee, or else how…
Once upon a time, almost 27 years ago, a young and ridiculously carefree artist set out across the Atlantic Ocean. Skippering the brand-new, tupperware yacht which carried this maiden was a carefree Master Mariner – also young, but with a six year circumnavigation of the globe in his wake. The vessel had barely crossed Biscay before these two young and carefree hearts began to beat as one, but she was about half way across the pond by the time the…
This article is the last in our series of five about the first European interactions with the people of Tierra del Fuego. If you haven’t been following along you may want to start at the beginning. The Allen Gardiner set out from the Falklands, and on reaching Tierra del Fuego she sailed around the bottom of Isla Navarino and beat up into the bay at Wulaia. Aboard the boat, the missionaries must have been feeling a mixture of excitement and…
Somewhat belatedly… the fourth in our series of articles about missionary encounters with the Yaghan. If you haven’t been following along, check out the first, second, and third articles. The final instalment will follow shortly! The days being short during the southern winter, by the time we reached Wulaia the sun was already low in the sky. We had planned to spend some time exploring the Yaghan ‘hut circles’, but as we approached the bay, wending our way amongst the…
We interrupt our series of articles about the Yaghan indians of Tierra del Fuego to bring you another tale about our day to day life down here. How do you picture the southernmost limit of mankind’s colonisation of this planet? Do you see snow and ice stacked up around little wooden houses? A back-drop of rugged mountains…? Wild winds whisking around the famous Cape and hurtling up through the channels…? The images that these words throw up are probably fairly…
This is the third article in our series about Western encounters with the Yaghan natives of Tierra del Fuego. If you haven’t been following along, check out the first and second articles. It being only a week or two before the solstice, and the shortest day of the year in the south, the time available to us for sailing in the Beagle Canal was limited. Not that it’s impossible to travel at night, but one certainly can’t make harbour under…