Chile's Southern Coastline

Chile's southern coastline is part of an area called Patagonia. As with all of Chile, the Andes mountains drop down to meet the sea. It's rugged, picturesque and isolated. There's mountainous islands, straits and narrow passages. No one lives where we're going. We'll cover 600 nautical miles in 6 days and travel the historic Magellan Strait and Beagle Channel. Nearing the southern tip, we'll visit an area called Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, and our goal, Cape Horn. We hope you'll come along.

We flew from Santiago Chile to Punta Arenas,  which is located 53 degrees south of the equator. We boarded the Stella Australis, a small cruise ship with 175 other people, then started down the coast. The winds were high, and the gusts higher.

We were disconnected from TV, radio, telephone and internet services. We had been told, we would see weather from all four seasons in the same day. As it turned out, at any one time when we panned the skyline, we would see several different weather systems. Then, as we moved, and the systems moved, the weather changed abruptly, sometimes within minutes. On our first shuttle ashore by zodiac, snow was in the air.

It became apparent that we were going to be challenged as we venture south along Chile's coastline to Cape Horn, where the cold Atlantic ocean mixes with the warm Pacific to create some of the most unstable weather in the world.  

Click here for the next story in this series:
http://travellingwithsteveandmarlene.blogspot.ca/2013/11/sunny-skies-but-rough-seas.html