Patagonia 6: Let Sleeping Sea Lions Lay

This craggy finger pokes from the sea some twelve miles south of Ushuaia, Argentina – the city at world’s end. Here Patagonia’s southern tip slices into the earth’s only spot where three oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic) swirl together to brew storms and tides which conjure fog, rain, snow, ice, gales, wave-surge, and lightening strikes that last moments, hours, or longer.

Detail of a 40 yard-long rock off the coast of Cape Horn

Daytimes, hundreds of night-hunting sea lions doze among this rock’s gnarls. Even at rest, their raucous snoring, burping, farting, and random-yelping eclipse the din of New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway. 

People who come within feet of these lightening-quick 400-500 pound sea mammals risk maiming and death. Sea lions have crushing muscles reinforced by scalpel-honed fangs and claws. Look closely. See their pelts gashed with cuts, holes, and wounds that etch tattoos of damage? 

Not a good plan to tip-toe among them and scream "BOO!" Y'think? 

GEEK STUFF: Despite a wind-whipped hail pelting the catamaran’s pitching deck I hand-held my Canon 7D’s EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens to get close as I dared to the colony of sleepers. Except for some PS-CC diddling with dynamic range in post, this image faithfully reveals the information within the raw capture.

Around noon on Saturday, January 26, 2019.  

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"!

Escape: Pepto To Quench Peptic

The Lone Tree
Pebble Beach, California

Six weeks ago my wife Rita had her knee replaced. A bit before  I moved my office from the Business2Business Magazines HQ, here to our home. Four, or so weeks ago, my buddy Rocco-The-Dog died. Last week we bought a new pup. During this, Rita's sister and brother-in-law came for a five day visit.

And, of course, the monthly magazines I edit came out on schedule on the first of this month. Life went peptic...

Photography's my baking soda: Pepto to quench life's peptic waves. It can be smoothed into the slower moments, massaging at angst and melancholy. This art stuff's is angst processor, dialing it down, or sometimes blotting it out.

Anxiety's tentacles can't hold onto feelings focused on say, the Lone Tree that clings to its Pebble Beach rock cropping into the Pacific. For at least the hour, or so, that I visited this place my mind-muscles floated free of the churning world so I could return to it with stress cranked way down.

I'm not whining. Rita's recovering wonderfully. This knee now matches the other she received a decade ago and its already improved her mobility and comfort exquisitely. I still ache for Rocco's company, but little Musser's fun and filling the void.

Here's Musser yesterday... All 9 weeks of him.

Okay, I found time in moments when the winds were quieter over the past five or so weeks to escape into my images, but didn't open minutes to think about the comments visitors left here below, nor have I responded to mail. That all wanted me to think, and while thinking's totally exciting, the swirl of these weeks demanded time to turn off thought and excitement and to wallow in the Pepto of places like Pebble Beach, y'know?

But... I'm baaaaaack! There's more time to refocus and to have the energy to think as well as feel. Still, it's a blessing isn't it to have this art narcotic ready when we need to mellow away for a bit, and crank down life's peptic volume?