After breakfast and picking up three of the crew who had slept on the beach, we headed off – under sail. Under main, staysail and mizzen we made a tight turn out of the anchorage and headed into the Beagle Channel. The border between Argentina and Chile runs through the middle of the Beagle Channel at this point, so we made a brief incursion into Argentinian territory before we tacked back to try and make it along the channel. After passing Gardiner Island we had to do a series of short tacks to clear various islands, reefs and wrecks as the wind headed us slightly, but after that we managed to make Puerto Eugenia on one tack.
One of the tacks took us fairly close past the wreck of the Logos. She was a Christian missionary ship and ran on the rocks in January 1988 with 141 evangelist missionaries and crew on board. Remarkably (or perhaps not given her mission!) everyone survived. The Argentinian pilot who was supposed to be guiding them out of the Beagle Channel had disembarked early and the course given took them onto the rocks. The 100 tons of religious and educational (!) books that they were carrying went down with her.
As we sailed further along the historic Beagle Channel, we saw and smelt (!) loads of cormorants, terns, albatrosses and skuas, but the highlight was a young humpback jumping and tail-thrashing. The main came down outside the anchorage and we headed in under mizzen and staysail, rounding up, dropping the staysail and dropping the anchor in one fluid movement …. A great day’s sailing, arriving around 2.30pm.
