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"!