Sunday, February 10

Patagonia 1: The Light at World's End


The world's southernmost light just beyond
Ushuaia, Argentina

At the very tip of America del Sur, perhaps three miles south of Ushuaia, the capital of Terra Del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world sits this ragged finger poking into Cape Horn's heavens - shuddering upon the most dreaded waters where three oceans smash at its cold cragged granite.



Geek Stuff: During January and February of 2019 we voyaged for weeks around Patagonia's tip, from Santiago, Chilé to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We sailed through the Channels of The Beagle and Magellan poking in and out of the fjords and down the Avenue of Glaciers. Here in Ushuaia we were halfway and two days after a small typhoon that forced us to flee behind the Chilean islands a way from 22' wind-whipped waves. Atop the shifting deck of our catamaran I cranked up the ISO to hand-held my trusty Canon EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens on its 7D Mark II. Then in post I dragged out a bunch of custom brushes into PS-CC. This thing's a totem! You look at it and the wind howls a choir's anthem.

Somehow it makes you whisper, "Amen"!


3 comments:

Cedric said...

Okay, all I can say here is: Wow, that sounds like one heck of a trip! A catamaran around Patagonia's coast?! Terra Del Fuego! Wow! That must have been something.
Amen indeed!

Ted said...

Um, well, er, maybe I've sort of hyperbole'd a tiny bit. See we sailed from Santiago in the large and comfortable Norwegian Sun. In each port there were opportunities for excursions. Here I hopped aboard a cat in Ushuaia that took us out to a collection of rock-islands that spatter the Arctic sea off the coast. So while everything I wrote here is absolutely factual perhaps a few things I didn't write might make it sound as if the sumptuous comfort of the cruise ship might not seem quite as... manly... as clinging to the deck of a tossing catamaran in the Cape Horn winds. Y'know?

But I wanted an adventure so... let me tell one, K? :-) And I did get damp... Honest.

Cedric said...

Ok, so a cruise ship doesn't quite paint the same picture as a catamaran but it takes nothing away from the adventure it must have been. I mean, sailing/cruising along the Patagonian coast, that's something worth recounting. I have always imagined Patagonia so other worldly and so remote. In fact, I have always thought Patagonia to be more remote than Antarctica or Siberia.