Leaving Valdivia
Clark May 5th, 2007
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Leaving Valdivia
37º30′ South, 73º49′ West
Nobody ever likes you as much as when you’re leaving. I was only there nine days, but in nine days you can get to know people pretty well with the dinner parties, movie nights, piano concerts, and boat talk with the locals. Lives intersecting, then parting.
Last night as I was leaving, time stopped for about twenty minutes. I needed fuel, which involved moving the boat to a different pier and driving up a tanker truck. The weather had made a marked change, and everyone was taking note. Valdivia is usually socked in overcast, but the evening brought clear skies and cold. The cold made a mist rise off the river at sunset, and it looked like a Monet painting. Rows of poplars faded into the mist, and the river steamed and meandered into obscurity. In the middle of refueling operations everyone just stopped what they were doing, gazed at the sunset over the river, and got all sentimental. I mean a toothless tank truck driver got all weepy and started reciting Pablo Neruda. The view really was striking.
This was all well and good, but it put me a bit behind schedule and in the position of having to run down the Rio Valdivia in the dark. The river has those death trap submerged walls lining the sides from the 1960 earthquake.
I made it down without incident, and made great time with the current behind me. Once I got to the sea, I looked behind me to see a massive moon lighting my way. I could see sixty miles around, which makes it much more relaxing for solo sailing. The time of first sighting of a target to impact is well over half an hour, as opposed to ten minutes in the pea soup down south. I’ve been sailing along, dead downwind, with the whisker pole out. Theoretically the Humboldt Current should be helping me along all the way up to the equator. Condesa’s got a bone in her teeth, and we should do 160 miles in the first 24 hours. This is the way I remember sailing, from way back in Brazil before the accident: I can cook, clean, read, and don’t have to hang on for dear life every second or shiver. I’ve been hanging on and shivering, more or less, the whole time I’ve been below forty degrees. The long underwear are stowed away, but the hats and fleece are still in circulation.
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