DARWIN AND MORALEDA CHANNELS
The scenery has been a little different today.
We’re still sailing North, through the crinkly bits, but the waterways are a little wider and the hills quite a bit lower, and softer. Beyond, to the East, the towering, snowy peaks of the Andes are never far away, but as we approach our next port-of-call, the going has become much gentler. Crucially, the sun has been shining, and the wind has dropped.
This has to be cruising at its most pleasant.
Just when I thought the onboard wi-fi couldn’t get any worse… it got worse. Clearly we are in a part of the world where satellite signals are slower – or maybe they are influenced by the gaping hole in the ozone layer over South America. It might also be possible that they need all the satellite signal they can get to run the ship, and the passenger wi-fi service simply gets pushed even further down the digital food chain. Whatever the reason… today, it’s been spectacularly bad. Not just slow, but really bad… it still mysteriously manages to chomp through my expensive data package, yet struggles to load so much as a single web page, or allow me to even view just the subject lines of emails. If there is anything important happening in the world that I should know about, then I’m blissfully ignorant… sending out a newsletter to my subscribers this month just isn’t going to happen. Don’t get me wrong… I’m loving Chile’s dramatic, sweeping vistas and soaring mountains, but I’m not loving the total lack of onboard connectivity.
At lunchtime (after getting thoroughly depressed by the lack of internet), we stood on the back deck enjoying warm windless sunshine, while around us people were getting their food and eating around the pool. It was a little early for us to eat since we were late getting up for breakfast, so we leant against the back rail watching the world go by, waiting for the smell of food to entice us.
As we were doing so, we saw a couple of whales in the distance, recogniseable by the spray from their blow holes. We were still looking on their direction (as was everybody else off the back deck) when a whale suddenly appeared on the opposite side of, and just off the stern of, the ship. The first we knew it was there was the sound it made as it breached the water and blew spray from its blow hole. What was incredible was just how close it was to us, and for several minutes afterwards, we saw its great body rising out of the water, and the spray that accompanied it. Awestruck, we watched as it raised its tail and finally plunged back into the depths – definitely the best whale sighting I’ve experienced. Dave the whale-man is certain that what we saw was a blue whale – the holy grail of whales!
