The weather comes through this anchorage in waves. First it’s a scene of summer idyll, the water and sky purest blue. Then dark clouds gather, making us wonder if there will be another hailstorm. The wind pauses here for an hour, or half a day, and then it comes again, screaming and running from the west.

The two islands protecting this spot are covered in low heath. Even in December, the middle of Southern Hemisphere summer, the vegetation is strangely the colors of Christmas — blood red and conifer green. No trees grow anywhere. There are sheep ashore, and cattle that run at the sight of us, and penguins that bray like donkeys.

My wife, Alisa, motions at the scene around Galactic, our 45-foot cutter — the thick beds of kelp, the elephant seals fighting on the beach with their weird moans and growls that carry so far. “Where are we?” she asks, with a kind of helpless amazement.

Alisa knows where we are literally, of course. We’re anchored between Barren and George islands, on the south side of the Falkland Islands. She’s referring to how unbridgeably different this place is from anywhere else we’ve been. And I understand just what she means. This kelp-infested, windy, lonely anchorage does a good impression of the end of the world.

We’ve been stuck here for days, waiting for the westerly wind to die. There are no other people around. And we — Alisa and I, and our sons Elias, 9, and Eric, 5 — are as happy as we can be. Before this visit, the Falklands were just another place that was indistinct on my mental map of the world, vaguely remembered from the war between England and Argentina in the 1980s and inconveniently located for a visit by sailboat. But now that we’re here, we’re discovering that the Falklands are a place from an earlier era, when the cruising scene was smaller, sailors visiting new places had the chance to discover them on their own and locals saw the arrival of a cruising boat as an event worth noting.

RELATED: Penguins in the Falklands

When we first arrived at Stanley, the capital and only town of any real size in the Falklands, we rafted up to three other sailboats tied to the working dock. These were all charter boats, mostly carrying passengers from the Falklands to Antarctica or South Georgia. The Falklands have long been an afterthought for visiting sailboats — a place to stop after rounding Cape Horn, or a launching-off place for the far south. Few boats have time, in the short southern ­s­ummer, to explore the Falklands themselves.

But when Galactic set out from Stanley, we had the month of December in hand to do nothing more than sail around the Falklands. We left on a day when the wind was absent, and we took the chance to make easy miles to the west with the motor, traveling along a flat and featureless coastline. Looking at the chart that day gave me ample opportunity to consider one of the great challenges of Falklands sailing: the legendary kelp. The chart indicated thick beds of kelp extending from every shore in a profusion that seemed like some kind of a joke. A closer look at some of the bays made me wonder where we would even sail, the open water appearing to be so scarce.

But as is the case with so many challenges of the sailing life, the kelp turned out to be more trouble in the anticipation than in the actual event. Kelp floats, after all, and so is easy to avoid. Better, kelp grows from rocks, so submerged dangers in the Falklands are helpfully marked by fronds of kelp. As we approached our first anchorage of the trip I began thinking of the kelp beds as a shadow shoreline that was more important to navigation than the actual land, and everything went fine.

The other thing for sailors to get used to in the Falklands is the wind. Twenty-five knots of wind just seems like more in the Falklands than it does in other places. And the wind often doesn’t satisfy itself with only blowing 25. Even after the year we had just spent in Patagonia, the gale that visited our first Falklands anchorage was an impressive thing. The muddy water of the inlet foamed and slapped around us. Galactic swung side to side and heeled over in the gusts. Not for the last time in the Falklands, we were quite happy with our large anchor.

That first blow lasted only for a day. But after we reached George and Barren islands, the westerlies set in as a part of those waves of weather that contributed to the end-of-the-world impression. A half day of fine weather would inevitably be followed by another blast of wind — wind that accelerated down the leeward slope of the Andes to rampage across the sea to the Falklands.

We were stuck in that anchorage for a week. These were the Furious 50s of southern latitudes, after all, and we weren’t surprised at persistent strong westerlies. Nor were we tempted to cross Falkland Sound, between East and West Falkland islands, until the west wind stopped blowing. Our determination to wait out the weather was helped by the fact that three of Galactic’s lower shrouds had broken strands, courtesy of our time in Patagonia and what was, in retrospect, undersize rigging. We had backed up the failing wire with a jury rig to keep the mast in place until we could return to Stanley to claim the replacement rigging that was coming from England on a ship.

We didn’t see another soul for the week that we waited, and that solitude made the remarkable natural history of the place seem like a gift that had been given to our family alone. Sea lions took every appearance of our dinghy as an invitation to play and would come charging out from the beach to see which of them could get closest to us. We watched elephant seals mock fight on the beach from only 30 yards away. Long walks on Barren and George islands showed us Magellanic penguins braying from their burrows and oystercatchers trying to distract us from their nests. A Johnny rook, the famously mischievous hawk of the Falklands, swooped down and grabbed Alisa’s hat right from her head.

Visitors in the Falklands should request permission before going ashore on remote properties, and we had been in email contact with the May family, the owners of the wonderful islands we were rambling around. When we shifted to Speedwell Island, their home island, we caught up with the Mays and had our first experience of out-island hospitality. We anchored off the Speedwell settlement and went ashore to say hello, and found ourselves suddenly in their comfortable house, ­having tea with the extended ­family. The only tension, or comedy, in the moment came with the sartorial transition from high-­latitude cruising to sipping tea in a stranger’s kitchen. Alisa apologized for her outfit as she pulled off her boots and rain gear and found herself having tea in her rainbow-striped long underwear — warm and comfortable, no doubt, but not quite the get-up for introducing yourself.

When the weather turned good, it turned good with a vengeance. A flat-calm day saw Galactic motoring across Falkland Sound to Albemarle, the 40,000-acre farm run by the Mays’ son. Here we were again met with spontaneous generosity and good company. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay, as the Falklands is no place to waste a fair wind. A day of brilliant sailing took us around the southern corner of West Falkland Island, where increasingly dramatic sea cliffs shone improbably in the sun. To the boys’ delight, gentoo penguins porpoised next to Galactic, and leaping Peale’s dolphins guided us into our anchorage.

The next morning, as we were charging out of the anchorage with a reefed main, we heard a familiar voice hailing us on the VHF. It was our friend Leiv Poncet on Peregrine, his rugged 37-foot cutter, returning to his home on Beaver Island after a charter trip taking biologists to an albatross colony. Leiv was our reason for visiting the Falklands, and his home on Beaver Island, at the far western edge of the group, had been a much-wondered-about destination of ours for years. It was a treat to sail to Beaver in company with Leiv, and a rare treat indeed — he later told us that it was the first time he could remember coming across another sailboat outside of Stanley.

While Leiv dropped his passengers at nearby New Island, we went ashore on Beaver to look around. From a rocky hilltop above the settlement, we had a clear view of the fascinating landscape of the far western Falklands. Moor-covered hills were interspersed with interlocking waterways of the clearest blue. Straight below us were the scattered buildings of the settlement, deeply weathered wooden structures out of another era. Hauled up above the high-tide line was the equally weathered Damien II, the famous 50-footer that Leiv’s parents, Jérôme and Sally, used to pioneer Antarctic cruising. A few sheep scampered in the foreground. And over the entire scene … there was silence. There were no boats traveling in the channels, and no roads on the outer islands. There was no evidence of human activity beyond the settlement below our feet. Our family of traveling Alaskans felt instantly at home.

We had met Leiv during a winter Galactic and Peregrine spent in Tasmania. Over shared dinners we heard stories about his home on Beaver Island and the singlehanded Southern Ocean voyage that had brought him to Tasmania. Leiv reminded us of our favorite commercial fishermen in Alaska — people who are hugely competent on the water, and don’t feel any need to show off about it. Leiv was clearly someone to listen to when the subject was sailing in the global south, and he was an eminently likable guy. We hit it off.

When spring came, Leiv set off for home — a nonstop passage from New Zealand to the Falklands via Cape Horn. His parting words stayed with me, a spell of an invitation from one sailor to another. “Come to Beaver Island,” he said. “I’ll give you all the mutton and reindeer that you can eat. You can dry out alongside our jetty to work on Galactic, and I’ve got an old Perkins 4108 that you can raid for spare parts.” Later that spring we left too, and began to follow Leiv, very slowly. It turns out that there are a lot of places between Tasmania and the Falklands where it’s worthwhile to linger. When we finally reached the Falklands, it had been almost three years since we’d seen Leiv.

Leiv turned out to be a man of his word. The tone for our visit to Beaver was set on the first day, when Leiv casually asked our boys if we should go out and shoot a reindeer. The island is home to a herd descended from animals that Norwegian whalers introduced to South Georgia Island.

The boys were delighted to find themselves in the back of a Land Rover, driving on off-road tracks and looking for reindeer. Galactic has been to any number of places where the boys have been told that they shouldn’t touch this or disturb that. Beaver Island is a working farm — unique in that its income comes both from sheep and from charter sailboats, Damien II and Jérôme’s more recent Golden Fleece. It was a revelation to our boys. After living their whole lives on a sailboat, all their romantic notions of land life were being confirmed.

That evening on the beach, Leiv grilled us all the mutton chops we could eat. He showed Eric and Elias how to catch and cook minnows from the settlement creek, and how to pluck the geese that we ate for Christmas dinner. He taught the boys to harvest the succulent hearts of the tussac grass that grew on the island, and he took them to catch mullet for the smoke house.

Alisa set up shop in the settlement kitchen, and she and Leiv started canning jar after jar of mutton and reindeer to see Peregrine and Galactic through the long sea miles ahead. While Galactic would soon be off for South Georgia and South Africa, Leiv would be setting off on an epic solo adventure to our home waters in Alaska.

Leiv had delivered on his first promise, and he soon delivered on the other two. We’d been losing a battle with a troublesome holding tank on Galactic, and it was time for it to come out. I hoped I could make the job less noisome if the boat was out of the water. So on the day after Christmas, Galactic duly tied up on the jetty to go dry on the tide. As a measure of just how important scrounging and recycling are when you’re maintaining boats in an out-of-the-way place, consider that Leiv gave every indication of being happy to put our used holding tank on the Beaver Island scrap heap against the day when it might come in handy. In exchange, he pulled out his old Perkins, the victim of a fire on Peregrine, and soon valuable bits of the engine were tucked away on Galactic.

The time came for us to continue our circumnavigation of the archipelago. The southern summer would only be so long, and we had plans for the rest of it. We’ve left plenty of islands with a bunch of bananas hanging from the stern arch, but this was the first time we’d ever left an island with a leg of mutton hanging from the rigging — a parting gift from Leiv. And we came away with a more memorable gift. One of the great joys of our life on Galactic is the remarkable people whom we’ve been lucky enough to call our friends; the great downside is the way our constant motion means we’ll likely never see most of them again. Our visit to Beaver Island was a chance to reconnect with a sailing friend on his remarkable home turf. In the midst of the wandering that would soon see Peregrine and Galactic on opposite sides of the Earth, we had each come to rest at the same time, in a splendid corner of the world, to catch up with each other’s news. That was a highlight of our sailing lives.

Of course, there was plenty more to discover during the rest of our sail around the Falklands. There was the sailing itself, which, in spite of our parted shrouds, gave us many days of delight and easy travel. There was the fantastic wildlife. We had other elephant seal haulouts to discover, and albatross and penguin colonies where our family could sit just a few yards from an incredible concentration of avian life to watch the show. And there was the way that the islands seemed to glow on a midsummer day, in the heartbreaking colors of the unpolluted far south.

But, for all the physical delights of the place, it was the people who made the Falklands. There was the hospitality of Leiv, who took the time at the busy peak of summer to show us around his island, and who always had a patient answer for our boys’ endless questions. There was the May family, inhabitants of remote farms who made visiting strangers instantly welcome. But even on the busier islands that play host to cruise-ship passengers, we found that it was impossible to go ashore without sitting down for tea and cookies, and in the relative bustle of Stanley we found more kindness than I could relate here. People are the soul of cruising, just like they’re the soul of any travel. Is it any wonder that we left the Falklands thinking we’d found the best cruising in the world?

– – –

At press time the Litzows were back in their home port of Kodiak, Alaska, after completing a 10-year, 65,000-mile voyage. Get in touch with Mike and his family at thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

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Slowly gliding up a creek in a launcha (a small, open powerboat), we spotted howler monkeys overhead in the branches of a breadnut tree. Usually, their haunting cries were frightening enough to scare the dead, but that day the howlers were quietly lounging on limbs, snacking on fruit. Farther up the creek, we encountered a father-and-son team skimming silently across the water in a cayuco, or canoe.

My husband, Ken, and I were visiting Guatemala’s Rio Dulce, or “sweet river.” It winds through cliffs and thick jungle for 20 miles, from its mouth in the Caribbean to the town of Fronteras, also known as Rio Dulce. It is a busy freshwater highway, and the focal point of life for those who live on its banks. The most common modes of transportation are cayucos and launchas. We saw locals washing clothes, bathing, and swimming in the river to cool off in the heat of the day, and young children paddling and fishing. Just beyond the town of Rio Dulce, the river opens up into the enchanting Lago de Izabal. Surrounded by verdant mountains, it is Guatemala’s largest lake.

When we made the decision to sail to Rio Dulce, I was most concerned about our safety; cruisers were killed there by robbers as recently as 2008. I also wondered about finding a marina where Mary T, our Morgan 38, would be looked after properly in our absence during the hurricane season. And then there was the bus ride from the marina to the airport in Guatemala City, because I’d heard horror stories of attacks on public transportation by armed bandits.

In my preoccupation with these concerns, I had failed to deeply consider the geography or the culture. I was blown away by what I found: a rich history; lush, majestic landscape; gentle people; tasty food; and everything ultimately affordable. And as it turned out, all my worries were for naught. The authorities have taken care of the highwaymen, and there are plenty of excellent marinas from which to choose.

Departing Livingston, on the Caribbean coast, and heading up the river feels like a trip back in time. Locals in cayucos tossed their hand-woven fishing nets in high arcs so they descended gracefully to the water to catch mojarra and robalo, which were offered at most restaurants. We followed the river as it wound through a jungle-­cloaked canyon that was featured in a 1935 Tarzan movie. Eventually, the cliffs gave way to gentler slopes. Dwellings of all sizes, with elegantly crafted thatched roofs, dotted the river banks, blending gracefully into the lush backdrop. There were no mega hotels of glass and steel marring the landscape here.

Continuing upriver toward the town of Rio Dulce, the waters widened into an area called El Golfete. I was astounded by the vistas of mountain ranges to the north and south. On the south side of El Golfete, we anchored at Cayo Quemado, or Burnt Key. Many refer to it as Texan Bay because a cruiser named Mike, from Texas, used to run the marina and restaurant on the hill. Now Burnt Key Marina is operated by a Dutch merchant-marine captain named Maurits, while Mike manages the restaurant, Manglar, next door. Maurits told us he had traveled the world over by boat and decided to settle in Cayo Quemado because he’d finally found paradise. We explored the well-protected anchorage’s little creeks by kayak and dinghy. We frequently saw men and women of diminutive stature and advanced age carrying tremendous loads of corn or rice on their backs and heads. Locals living on the banks approached Mary T, selling handcrafted wares and coconut bread from their cayucos. They came with precious little children who looked up at us with dark, soulful eyes, making it nearly impossible not to buy something.

A short dinghy ride from Cayo Quemado, we visited a cave; augas calientes, or hot springs; and a natural sauna. At the restaurant on-site, we had delicious fresh fish and local fare. Felix, our cave guide, was a spritely man of 70 who skipped up the steep stone path to the cave like a man a third his age.

Twelve miles upriver from Cayo Quemado, we came to Puente Rio Dulce, the longest bridge in Central America, which crosses the river from the town of Rio Dulce to Relleno on the other bank. We had arrived at the heart of the region, where hundreds of cruisers enjoying the western Caribbean flock to store their vessels for hurricane season. It is 20 miles inland and rarely touched by those ocean storms. Everywhere we looked, there were masts.

Rio Dulce is a small, dusty, bustling town with stores and vendors’ stalls going right up to the edge of the road. Squeezing between cattle trucks and fruit stands in the heavy traffic required a certain amount of agility, but shopping was a pleasure because the produce was so affordable and fresh. Mangos, papayas, avocados and other local fruits cost less than half of what we were used to paying in the States. There were dozens of restaurants, and vendors grilling meat right on the street. We ate the traditional lunch, which included corn tortillas, beans, rice and meat for around 30 quetzales ($4 USD).

When we wanted to avoid the noise and heat of downtown, we bought food right on the river. Folks from Casa Guatemala, a local orphanage, came twice a week by launcha to the marinas and anchored their boats to hawk fresh produce, meats and cheeses. We could reach dozens of restaurants by dinghy. Most served fresh local fare with a western twist. Our favorites were the Sundog Cafe, for its excellent drinks and pizzas, and Bruno’s Marina. One cruiser cooked and sold lunch right from her boat for 25 quetzales a plate. We listened to the morning cruisers net for announcements of the daily lunch specials at a number of restaurants.

We found plenty of places to explore in and around Rio Dulce. One of these excursions was to the historic Castillo San Felipe, a well-preserved fort located at the bend in the river where the Rio Dulce meets Lago de Izabal. The 17th-century edifice was built by the Spanish to protect their territory from the British and pirates. We rode launchas to sites up and down the river that were too far to go by dinghy or kayak. Lago de Izabal was a fine place to see. We took Mary T, but we also could have seen it by launcha. There were a few restaurants and protected spots to anchor on its shores. We enjoyed investigating the many creeks off the river in search of howler monkeys, rare birds and restaurants. We discovered two eco-hotels hidden up creeks in the mangroves: Casa Perico and Kangaroo. Both were great stops for lunch and beverages.

One day, Ken and I ventured out of town on a collectivo bus to Finca El Paraiso, where we swam under a near scalding-hot waterfall that emptied into a cool pool. When it started getting busy there, we hopped on another collectivo to El Boqueron, where an old man took us for a ride in his cayuco up an enchanting river canyon. The return collectivo trip to Rio Dulce involved some acts of contortion as we were obliged to stand hunched over the other passengers until seats became available.

More comfortable, air-conditioned buses were available for travel farther afield. Antigua Guatemala, the beautifully preserved former capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala and a UNESCO World Heritage site, was definitely worth the visit. Volcanoes provided the backdrop to brightly painted colonial buildings and grand cathedrals in various stages of decay. The town of Panajachel on Lake Atitlan was another must-see. This breathtaking crater lake is surrounded by mountains and three volcanoes. In both places, vendors plied the streets with brightly colored hand-woven fabrics and trinkets.

Boat maintenance in Rio Dulce cost a fraction of what we’ve paid in the United States. There were a number of skilled locals and expats who did every kind of boat work imaginable. We had a new mainsail sewn by an Italian expat named Luigi, and folks at Captain John’s varnished our Morgan 38 inside and out, and had it looking better than ever upon our return from the States.

We found Rio Dulce’s cruising community to be very active and generous. I was most impressed by the volunteer work being undertaken in remote villages, including a volunteer organization called Pass It On Guatemala that brings solar panels and boat batteries to provide light to clinics and school. The smiles on the faces of the villagers when the lights go on is the payoff for volunteers.

The cruisers in Rio Dulce set an inspiring example. We sailors can only go so long treating ourselves with new vistas, adventures and local cuisine, right? At some point we need to do something for someone else. Pass it on.

Amy Flannery is a filmmaker and lives aboard the Morgan 38 Mary T with her husband, Ken Kurlychek.

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My wife, Alisa, and I were determined not to make bad weather the focus of our trip to Patagonia. But there was one night when the conditions lived up to their reputation. Galactic, our 45-foot steel cutter, was swinging at anchor in Puerto Natales, halfway down the 900 miles of fjords that make up Chilean Patagonia. Puerto Natales is on the inland side of the Andes, where we found the dry grasslands of pampas instead of the dripping rainforest of the coast. Sailing around Natales was just like sailing around Colorado — if Colorado had salt water, flamingos, and more dramatic mountains and glaciers.

But Puerto Natales has no well-protected anchorage. The famous Patagonia & Tierra del Fuego Nautical Guide, more commonly called the “Italian guide,” which is the definitive reference for sailing Patagonia, calls the anchoring situation there “just a step short of tragic.” And being inland of the Andes means that Natales is also subject to winds that come screaming down mountain slopes to surprise visiting sailors.

We had just put our boys, Elias and Eric, to bed. Without warning, winds began funneling over the Andes and into the open anchorage. A routine night on the hook suddenly turned into something beyond our experience in eight years of full-time sailing.

We rushed to get our dinghy on deck and deflated as the winds began to howl in the rig. And then conditions became completely unreasonable. Galactic was knocked from side to side in the dark night, taking punches of wind so violent that Alisa wondered whether the mast would touch the water. We were caught out with only 4-to-1 scope as the water started foaming and spraying around us, and our trusty 88-pound Rocna dragged a tenth of a mile before we got another anchor in the water. And we were the lucky ones. The 70-foot commercial boat anchored next to us was blown out of the anchorage completely.

This is the kind of story that comes to mind when you think of Patagonia, right? Paint-peeling winds, driving rain, pitiless conditions?

What if I mentioned that this happened in mid-June, just as the southern winter was locking down, and that we were about to head farther south in the very heart of winter, down into the far reaches of Tierra del Fuego. Our conditions would be cataclysmic, right?

Well, no. First of all, winter in Patagonia is a not-so-secret golden season, when the polar high extends over the southern tip of South America, bringing long spells of settled conditions.

But Patagonia also suffers from a reputation problem. The need to tell a good story has created an outsize picture of the challenges involved. Alisa and I read a lot of tales about sailing Patagonia before we arrived, and too many of them read as accounts by self-styled “expert sailors” who wanted us to know they were dealing with “extreme conditions.” Their stories began to seem like endless repetitions of “Patagonia: It’s really windy!” Surely, we thought, there must be more to it than that.

Luckily, we were right. Occasionally rotten weather is a part of Patagonia, sure, but it isn’t the essence of the place. That essence has more to do with qualities such as stillness, majesty and solitude. Experiencing these aspects of Patagonia from the deck of your own boat is still one of the great adventures to be had on the planet. And by doing the trip in the winter, we doubled down on that adventure. Going in winter gave us solitude in anchorage after anchorage. We went months without meeting another cruising boat. And winter turned a place that is persistently gray in the summer into a crystalline wonderland of blue skies and frosty white mountains.

The wind raged for three hours that night in Natales, and then was suddenly gone. Alisa and I were both a little dazed by the experience, and impressed at how our two boys, who have spent their entire lives at sea, could sleep through the nautical uproar. Completely unwilling to trust the weather at that point, we stood anchor watches until drowsiness and dull calm convinced us it was OK to sleep.

The next day, the harbor was mirror-calm. But when I went to the Armada de Chile, the Chilean navy, to request a zarpe, the paperwork that would give us permission to continue southward,

I learned that the port was still closed and no departures were allowed. Bureaucracy hadn’t caught up with the change in conditions. I was told the port would be closed a day or two more. And no, I couldn’t have a zarpe until it was open.

In Patagonia the weather might not be that bad, but the bureaucracy can require your most determined go-with-the-flow attitude.

Eventually, the armada officer agreed to give me a zarpe on the off chance that the port might be open the next day. This made me as pleased with my improving Spanish as it did at getting a little concession from officialdom.

When we left Natales, the whole crew was gripped with the excitement of heading farther south. We already had enough snow to let the boys make snowmen on deck, and that first taste of real winter made us eager for more.

Leaving Natales, we transited the narrows of Angostura White, where the tidal currents can run 10 knots. The excellent current tables produced by the armada saw us through safely, and Galactic was soon tied into Caleta Mousse, a perfect little cove, or caleta, tucked into the base of a mountain wall. Only a day from the relative bustle of Natales, this was a place that gave us everything we had dreamed of in Patagonia. Dolphins played in the caleta, Andean condors soared over the high mountains across the fjord, there was good hiking through the Dr. Seuss-like vegetation on the hillside above us, and we had a perfectly sheltered nook where Galactic could wait out a few days of driving snow while held in place by four lines tied to massive trees.

Anchorages like Caleta Mousse are the key to Patagonia. There are hundreds of little coves where the deep water allows a cruising boat to tie securely to the trees, often only a few feet from the shore. With high trees blocking the wind, and shorelines fore and aft, there is nothing in the weather that can bother a boat tied in to points onshore in these places.

But getting in and out of such protected spots is when things can go awry.

And so it was when we tried to leave Caleta Mousse. The morning was calm. I started rowing around the anchorage, untying our lines from the trees while Alisa and Elias pulled them to Galactic. With the lines retrieved, we started to pull the anchor.

It was then that we realized the shape of the mountain wall west of the caleta was perfect for pulling the wind down into the anchorage. All we knew on this morning was that when the anchor was just about up, we were suddenly hit by williwaws that made the water smoke. Alisa quickly spooled out chain, but it was no good. There wasn’t enough room to swing. We needed shore lines again.

I jumped into the dinghy and rowed like a madman to the upwind side of the caleta, a shore line tied around my waist. Once I had finally tied us off to a tree I looked back in relief. And then I saw a sight that made all my confidence evaporate, a sight that turned all my dreams of sailing through Patagonia into so much fluff blowing in the breeze.

A williwaw had Galactic in its teeth and wasn’t letting go. I stared at the underbody of our floating home while the mast leaned over at a crazy angle. Surely we weren’t so close to the shore that the masthead was over the rocks? Alisa was desperately trying to power into the wind blast. She was trapped at the wheel and unable to go up to the bow to tie off the shore line that would solve all of our problems.

It was only for a moment, but that moment stretched out in the suspense of what might happen. Standing there on the beach, the adrenaline of the row ebbing from my veins, I felt my shoulders slump at the knowledge that I was nothing but a spectator. For that one moment, I just stood on the beach and watched whatever would happen, happen.

Of course, the williwaw passed, and Alisa soon had the shore line tied off. We agreed that we would have to be more cautious about picking our moments to leave anchorages. And Alisa reported to me, with some wonder in her voice, that through it all the boys hadn’t evinced any kind of worry. They had been down below, laughing their heads off and cheering the wind on to give them a better ride.

Complete ignorance at what might really go wrong — it must be one of the greatest blessings of childhood. And our determination to see Patagonia as more than a series of confrontations with outrageous conditions? That was getting a little threadbare.

When the weather forecast was ideal, we pulled the shore lines and slid out of Puerto Profundo at first light. In the weeks since we left Natales, I had become intoxicated with how sailing through Patagonia was such a linear adventure. It wasn’t at all like the incredibly open spaces that we were used to from the Pacific. We were always hemmed in on two sides by mountain walls, so the only decision open to us was whether to move forward or go back. Which was no decision at all. We traveled farther and farther south. The days grew shorter with every passing mile, and the scenery grew more and more splendid. The sailing was fantastic, with a scrap of jib being all that was needed to see us speeding along on the prevailing northwest wind. On Galactic, family life slowed down as we found the natural pace of living through the long nights of winter without any of the distractions of the Internet or television to dilute our experience of the place and the season. I was in heaven.

And things were about to get even better. From Puerto Profundo we motored into the Strait of Magellan. As we made the turn into the western entrance, the sun cleared the clouds to illuminate the snowy mountains on either side of us. Who couldn’t feel the moment? We were at the very spot where Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to sail into the Pacific and, finding it on the same sort of calm day that we were enjoying, gave it the name that we all know it by.

That night we tied in at Puerto Angosto, where Joshua Slocum anchored Spray during his first solo circumnavigation of the globe. Slocum was at Angosto for something like a month, and made six unsuccessful attempts to set off from that spot before the weather let him get away.

We were sailing legendary waters.

The eastern Strait of Magellan is a nightmare of huge tides, exuberant winds and few good anchorages. After Magellan made it through the strait, attempt after attempt to repeat his route failed. Luckily, cruising boats can leave the strait around Cabo Froward, the southernmost point of continental South America, and continue along the fjords into the Land of Fire — Tierra del Fuego. We followed that path, and found we had the whole spectacular cruising grounds pretty much to ourselves. There were a few fishing boats around, and every morning we came up on the Patagonia cruisers SSB net and emailed our position to the armada. But even with those occasional reminders of the rest of humanity, our family mostly seemed to be carrying our own envelope of solitude around with us, from anchorage to anchorage, through crystal day after crystal day.

The snow line came down to the sea. The mountainous islands through which we traveled were majestic, remote and polar. Each anchorage was mysterious, and a study in ice and snow and cold when compared to our expectations of what a normal cruising anchorage should look like. The best anchorages were surrounded by hills where the family could walk in the snow and build snowmen, and the boys could indulge in the ­limitless joy of throwing snowballs at their captain and generally causing a ruckus.

After we entered Canal Beagle, conditions seemed to be building to more and more delirious levels of thrills. Our destination of Puerto Williams, Chile, the southernmost town in the world, was less than 100 miles away. With every mile, the sailing got wilder, the mountain scenery more spectacular. It felt like we might reach takeoff before the trip ended, might attain some otherworldly plateau of sailing adventure that we couldn’t have imagined before we set off but which became obvious, even inescapable, to us now. Fully half of the anchorages we investigated were frozen over, and we got used to the sound of ice grinding against our hull at night with a change in wind or tide. Turning a corner with Galactic might bring us face to face with a cathedral of glacial ice spilling over mountain buttresses to the sea.

And then the day arrived when we came out of the metaphorical cold. After months of wandering on our own, we called the Puerto Williams armada on the VHF to give notice of our arrival. We pulled into the “uttermost yacht club in the world,” a 1930s-era freighter named Micalvi that has been scuttled in a shallow inlet to make a clubhouse and dock for visiting sailboats. We found about 40 boats rafted to the ship, most of them left for the winter while their owners flew home. Our arrival bumped the number of inhabited boats to six. We found ourselves immersed in a warm social scene of like-minded people who shared the bonds of common experience.

I can’t say enough about choosing winter for our first visit to the far south. Winter makes everything lonely and mysterious, the way Patagonia should be. We approached the whole undertaking with humility. We were confident, but we assumed nothing. We prepared adequately, and we consciously worked at making good decisions. Our goal was to make it look easy, with as few close shaves or harrowing tales as possible. And more than that, we wanted to have a blast. We wanted Patagonia in winter to be a really good time.

That part worked. The kids had a blast. Alisa had a blast. I had a blast.

And the sense of moving through the out-of-the-way corners of Patagonia independently? The feeling of choosing our pace and taking responsibility for everything? The relish of dreaming about a trip like this and then doing it, and finding ourselves equal to it?

It’s no wonder people find the sailing life so hard to give up.

• • •

At press time, the Litzows were crossing the Pacific, en route to Hawaii. You can follow the family and their travels aboard Galactic at www.thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

The post Sailing Patagonia in The Winter appeared first on Cruising World.

The Thing With Pictures

Days like this, you don’t get pictures of.

We arrived in Puerto Natales late yesterday, just in time to sniff out a place of rest in this notoriously un-welcoming anchorage. The Italian Guide, with a poetic flourish, calls the anchoring situation here “just a step short of tragic”.

When we woke this morning, our solution to the anchoring puzzle from last night wasn’t looking too good. Onshore breeze (light), half a meter of water under the keel.

So Alisa and Elias (yes! a helpful little deckhand these days) and I spent the morning untying the cat’s cradle we’d woven the night before. Shorelines aboard, stern hook up, except that it was set so hard I couldn’t budge it from Fernando with the trip line; so bow hook up first, then stern hook pulled with the windlass, doing the dance between anchors with that shore just downwind of us.

We did all that without taking a single picture. Just like we took no pictures during the afternoon filled with the traveler’s chores of armada paperwork (the bit of piping that attaches the armada guy’s pistol to his body, and why is it only the guy at the front desk who is always armed?), food run (a thousand pesos for the taxi to drive through the gate to the fisherman’s dock? we’ll shlep), and propane fill-up (clouds of white vapor collecting around legs of the voluble woman, queen of all that she surveys in her backyard propane emporium, as she decants cooking gas into our foreign cylinders). Days like this stretch and surprise you, and the memories last. But somehow I never end up with pictures of these days.

Now that we’re in Natales, we also have access to the internet. So, after that intro on what sort of pictures you don’t get, here is a story told through the ones we did.

So, two things strike me at this point. First, this is such a linear adventure. It’s not like crossing the Pacific, when you travel across incredibly open spaces. Here you’re always hemmed in on two sides, with only the decision of going forward or going back. Which is no decision at all. So it becomes quite intoxicating, this forever traveling southwards, waiting to see what the next day will bring.

The second thing is that this is such a democratic adventure. A lot of boats come here, and from what we’ve seen they’re pretty average sorts of boats for the most part. Whatever the drawbacks of our age, we do live at a time when it doesn’t take a Tilman. Any Jane and Joe can come here and have their own adventure.

And if you want to escape the maddening crowds, you can just come in the winter.

Family Affair

The last time we picked ice out of the water was in the very first two weeks after we left Kodiak – perilously close to eight years ago. Someone gave us the local knowledge to get through the sill into the upper part of Northwestern Fjord in the Kenai Fjords. What did we know back then of using a laptop as a plotter? In front of the glacier, I used our landing net to pick some ice out of the water for G&Ts that night. Elias watched from the cockpit in his snow suit, gumming on the end of a sheet.

We just spent two days knocking around the floating ice of Estero Peel. This time there was no need for me to do the ice netting. Elias was mad for the sport – patiently waiting on the bow with his net, and then charging along the side decks to chase down any small piece that came alongside. He and Eric ate the stuff – bit right into it and chomped it on down. I couldn’t watch. They also had some glacier ice in a celebratory juice, and Alisa and I had scotch on the rocks for two nights in a row.

Not incidentally, both boys were ecstatic with our experience of being around the ice. “This is the best day of my life” has a certain honesty to it when it comes from the mouth of a five-year-old. They can presumably remember most of them at that point.

Many of the anchorages so far have offered zero walking opportunity. The terrain is too steep, and the forest too thick – this is something that we expected based on our experience with fjords in Alaska. But enforced time on the boat has really weighed on the boys over the last few weeks – especially Eric, who has a younger kid’s need to run and scream, and less of an eight-year-old’s ability to cerebralize his way through a day spent inside.

But when it’s good for the kids – when there’s ice in the water, or when the clouds part to reveal glaciated peaks above us, or when Caleta Tilman gives us the terrain for a walk – at those times, near-freezing rain is no barrier at all to their enjoyment. The revel in the moment, they scream out the news of their happiness. After Estero Peel we came into Puerto Bueno, which gave us our first taste of real upland walking, a close view of culpeo, the fox, and our first taste of centolla, the king crab of Patagonia. (It was a female and we ate it anyway. Standards are slipping.) We seem to be on an upwards trajectory in terms of getting off the boat, and we expect that to continue all the way south.

And, during all the long days that we’ve spent together, we’ve hit a certain sweet spot in family life. Lots of games of Uno while the diesel stove heats the saloon, lots of time for me to listen to Elias go on and on about his make-believe world, No-Cars Planet, time for me to look at Eric across the saloon and to notice how his face is maturing and how tall he is getting, and to remember how recently it was that I was telling Alisa I was enjoying the experience of having a three-year-old again. Except that now he’s five.

The Old Man Was Here

On the day we crossed into the 50s south latitude we saw our first ice. Floating bits that had calved from the glaciers at the head of Seno Penguin had just made it to Canal Wide before melting away completely and they gave the boys no end of delight. I jibed to get us a closer view before calling them up to deck. They oohed and ahhed and then after they went back to their lessons I hand steered through the field of little floaty bits that the jibe had brought across our path. I realized that a crew more used to ice would likely have just let the autopilot steer a ruler’s course through this inconsequential scattering but I was happy with the novelty and also happy not to find out how big a “thump” these little things might make if we hit them.

One of the delights of our trip is the number of giant petrels that we’ve found in the canales. I wonder if that isn’t just a winter occurrence. Not vast flocks of them but often a single one wheeling around the ship, three or four or five of them in the course of the day. These improbable-looking giants have become my favorite pelagic seabird and their presence in this inland setting gives the canales an extra touch of grandeur. As if they needed it.

On the day we saw that first ice we sailed down Canal Concepción in the company of blowing whales. There appeared to be two species, both with strongly falcate dorsal fins and one of them very small – much shorter than Galactic, for instance. We were near the open sea and the weather was coming in waves, clear followed by sharp and foul. The mountains around us were cyclically revealed, gauzed over in the mist, and hidden completely. On our starboard we had an island called Madre de Dios which should give an idea of the scope of the scenery. Each one of those islands might produce an enjoyable fortnight of exploration for a yacht in no hurry to be somewhere else.

We came screaming around Isla Canning going ever so fast as we chose, the acceleration where the wind funneled by the canal made the turn around the island giving us all the breeze we could need. Running backstay set up firm, jib half rolled in. We saw our first honest-to-goodness williwaw lifting water off the surface of Canal Andres just downwind of our selected anchorage and elected to make the final approach under engine alone. The anchorage was perfectly snug, a little slot in the rock not much wider than a marina berth. We ended up with a comfortable four-point tie though not without the exertion of myself scrambling up slopes of mixed moss and branch to make the tie onto a stout trunk and Alisa finding herself in command of the ship when it very nearly laid up against the trees at the side of the berth, ten meters of depth being available directly below the outermost dripping branches.

We took a weather day and on the morning we left sighted a full-grown centolla in about four meters of water on the rocky bench just next to us. We have yet to taste the king crab of Patagonia and so, scarce propane be damned, Alisa and Elias set out in Fernando to effect the capture with a landing net lashed to a boat hook for the event.

It was a close thing, but in the end all they caught was long faces.

As we continued southwards I became convinced that I could see the snow line coming closer with every mile we traveled. We are on half rations of propane and so a warm breakfast and lunch and endless cuppas are not among our consolations in the wet and cold. Alisa though is a champ about giving the on-deck crew the lion’s share of the hot water from the thermos and Elias is very delighted with himself for being the first to give voice to the idea that we might heat water on the diesel stove while at anchor. Which we are, quite successfully, and short diesel is not a problem that we are contemplating. Alisa has reacted to the propane shortage by doubling or tripling the amount of bread she makes on each baking day, reasoning that the increased production takes little or no more propane than her normal two loaves. She also has produced pigs in a blanket on her last baking day and has promised them for today – hot dogs wrapped in extra dough. So we have a hot lunch to look forward to. All sorts of food that are normally “just in case” rations – hot dogs and canned fruit most notably – have become staples. No one is grumbling about the shortage and though Alisa is occasionally at a complete loss when meal time arrives she has expressed the upside in the form of not feeling her normal remorse and responsibility if a meal falls short of expectation. Which of course they never do. We’ll all feel the luxury of living with no limits to the propane whenever that happy day comes again.

The final end to all propane on board and the end to our visas – both these events are far enough in the future to allow us the chance to explore a bit around Estero Peel, the fjord that gave Bill Tilman and crew access to the Patagonian Icecap on Mischief in 1956. We are at this moment anchored in a little cove that the monumental Italian Guide refers to as “Caleta Tilman”. The old man would have likely found this a comic appellation, as he only anchored Mischief here because he couldn’t reach Caleta Amalia, where he really wanted to be, due to all the floating ice about. See the quote from Mischief in Patagonia at the top of this post. Or, on the other hand, the old fellow might have found that if some place was going to be named for him, it might as well be as inconsequential a place as this.

The boys quite enjoyed our arrival at Caleta Tilman because low tide revealed a scrap of open land that might more or less reasonably be called a beach, and with it the attendant chance to walk a few hundred meters before turning around. Eric has in all the innocence of extreme youth asked Alisa why we came to this place (meaning Patagonia), anyway? He feels the enforced confinement more than Elias who can read Harry Potter over and over. Eric has been pining a bit for Polynesia, where at least he could swim, though his inability to swim at the ripe old age of four, and now five, has attracted quite a bit of negative attention from management on board Galactic. On the bright side he is just now learning the basics of literacy, though he takes greatest delight in reading (and writing, in a surprisingly clear hand) words like “scream”, “stinky”, “fart” and “butt”.

On the beach of this caleta where Tilman and company found bugger all we found a pair of Adidas trainers, a smart phone and a Becker beer can (empty). Alisa found a substantial stream for doing laundry and now the laundry is hanging in the rigging to “dry” at the same time that our rain catcher is hanging in the rigging, doing its job. This is either a setup for ineffectiveness or a situation where we’ll win one way or the other.

It’s all how you look at it.

The post South American Adventure appeared first on Cruising World.

Bareboat, skippered and fully crewed charters will be offered in all locations aboard monohulls and multihulls. The Croatia base is Dream’s second along the Adriatic Sea coast; the company’s other base in the region is in Sibenik.

In other news, Dream, which is the exclusive representative for the Catana Bali 4.5 in the United States, planned to debut the catamaran at the Strictly Sail boat show in Miami, Florida, in February. The Bali 4.5 will be available at the company’s bases in Annapolis, Maryland; the Bahamas; the Whitsunday islands, Australia; Turkey; and the British Virgin Islands. The Bali 4.2 will be available in Croatia.

Contact the company for details at www.dreamyachtcharter.com.

The post Brazil Among New Charter Destinations appeared first on Cruising World.

My wife, Irene, and I were approaching Bonaire, the “B” in the ABC islands group that includes Aruba and Curaçao. We were three days out of Grenada and a bit ragged. I’d raced J/24s around this point many times in years past, but tonight that didn’t really help; if anything it just reminded me of the dangers of that low-lying, rocky coast.

And to exacerbate matters, the South American chip in my plotter included charts that ended just after Grenada. But we also knew that the water around Bonaire was so deep that if you could avoid hitting the island itself, there was nothing else to bump into.

We headed more northward up the coast. The shore was black and not a glimmer of any light came from this uninhabited end of the island; the only way to tell how far we were offshore was to plot a series of positions on a paper chart (how quaint). A wave of pungent warm air heavily scented with guano and shallow water blew over Moose, our 39-foot South African-built steel cutter. The salt pans were to starboard.

We sailed along at 6 and 7 knots with the night wind full on the beam and a gentle current astern. It was a beautiful moment, I thought, while peering out past the streaming telltales for an unwanted line of white coral. At 0400 we picked up a mooring in front of Kralendijk, Bonaire’s largest town, and went below to sleep. I dozed off well satisfied with the landfall, but also eager for the next day (now two hours away) because Bonaire is a very special place.

Location, Location, Location

If you follow the long curving shoulder of the Caribbean islands from the Virgins down past Guadeloupe and Martinique to Trinidad, you’ll see that the cruising route continues west along the offshore islands of Venezuela and along to Bonaire, Curaçao and Aruba, the so-called ABCs. From Trinidad onward this entire run is outside the hurricane belt. So for sailors who wish to continue sailing during the June to November storm season, this area is a fine option. The offshore islands of Venezuela are stunningly beautiful and they present no security issues. I personally would keep away from the Venezuelan mainland, though, and definitely from the area around Isla Margarita.

Sailboats en route to Cartagena or the Panama Canal, as well as those heading to Curaçao for long-term storage, will find Bonaire a great place to provision or simply kick back and relax. A boat and crew planning to stay several months in Spanish Water at Curaçao can take advantage of a day when the wind backs into the northeast and make the 40-mile run over to Bonaire for a change of scenery.

Perhaps the ultimate attraction of Bonaire is the undeniable fact that it has the best diving and snorkeling in the Caribbean, period.

Anchoring? No Weigh!

The entire coastline of Bonaire is a national park, from the high-tide mark to depths well beyond recreational diving, and anchoring is forbidden everywhere. However, because of the island’s long-established dive industry, there are diving buoys all around the island that may be picked up for daytime use. To accommodate visiting yachts, two- or three-dozen moorings have been placed all along Kralendijk’s waterfront. They have a somewhat unusual two-line configuration whereby the boat runs two short lines from its forward chocks and loops them through the thimbles on the mooring lines. It works, but the system could safely be beefed up, and at $10 per night, perhaps it should be. On the positive side, Bonaire is kidney-shaped, with Kralendijk in the enclosure; Klein Bonaire, a circular island a mile or so offshore, protects the mooring field from almost all wind angles. If one of those awkward breezes does arrive, boats can take shelter in one of the marinas.

Maybe the best way to give a sense of Bonaire’s ambience would be simply to mention that there is not a single traffic light on the island. It is a very mellow, untrampled Caribbean isle. The waterfront is reminiscent of Havana, Cuba’s Malecon: an endless parade of small vignettes of daily life. At one end, boats from Venezuela sell produce; elsewhere, fishermen land and clean their catches. Slick restaurants vie for clients and local people just live their lives, chatting, gossiping and swimming. The line of cruising boats all along the seawall, with flags and laundry flying, adds color and activity. If you happen to be a runner, the broad sidewalk along the water’s edge is exactly 1.5 kilometers long.

Cruising Bonaire

You could certainly leave the dinghy on your mooring and venture to any of the scores of dive buoys, a very manageable option that makes for a great day. But sailors generally tend to stay on their moorings and take dinghy trips, frequently over to Klein Bonaire. Harry Belafonte once owned the island; can you imagine him in baggy trousers and Panama hat with a cigarette sauntering down that white sand?

Irene and I ran the dinghy over to “Harry’s beach” one day when the sky was full of cumulus clouds and the breeze was cooling. We were just finishing our 10-year circumnavigation and were feeling sort of jaded with many things, diving and snorkeling locations among them (I swear I’ve seen 100 of the “Top 10 Dive Sites” in the world). Today we were in for a wake-up call.

The water all around Bonaire is very deep, thousands of feet. This means that there is very little sedimentation in the water, and consequently the clarity is startling; you can easily see 100 feet underwater. We donned our snorkel gear and swam out 50 feet and were stopped cold by the drop-off. The white sand bottom simply went over a steep slope and ran down in darker and darker blues until it was royal purple and all visibility gave way to seeming infinity. The water was so clear it felt like you were flying, a disconcerting sensation at first. And then came the fish!

A school of palometa surrounded us. These foot-long fish are silvery with very elongated fins on the top and bottom of their bodies. They’re graceful and exotic, and they’re very curious. They engulfed us like a dream. It was a scene of indescribable beauty; the white sand falling away to navy-blue nothingness and these birdlike fish flying all around us.

That day we saw turtles and maybe 30 different fish species. We walked back along the beach and came to a pair of Dutch girls snorkeling close to shore; they were so excited with the fish that they were both talking through their snorkels to each other. Yup, there’s good snorkeling in Bonaire!

A Good Old-Fashioned Gravel Run

Bonaire is small; you can drive a car around the whole island in a couple of hours (and probably fit lunch into those). A lot of cruisers opt to rent a car to see the island, although a scooter or even a plain old bicycle would serve very well. Bonaire’s people are calm and certainly very courteous on the road; in fact too courteous sometimes as traffic often will come to a standstill when a person gives up his right-of-way out of friendliness!

Two places that many cruisers visit are Lac Bay and the famous salt pans. A moderately fit person could pedal out to both of these spots and would have a great adventure doing it. Lac Bay is a large, shallow (ondiep as the locals say) bay on the windy east side that in the past was home to thousands of conchs. Mountains of their bleached shells attest to the bygone fishery.

Today conservation efforts have encouraged a comeback, and the old landing place is a social center with snack bars and tiny restaurants built into fishermen’s shacks. It’s a charming spot, vibrant with Caribbean colors and the smell of frying fish and beer-and-lime.

On the way to and from Lac Bay you’ll see the indigenous lorikeet, a perky, likable green and goldenrod bird that is constantly shrieking out some urgent story. They perch confidently on the spines of the tall cacti that punctuate the countryside. Feral donkeys roam the area begging for snacks, and in the underbrush you might come across a big iguana with a face that would send a tomcat running.

If Lac Bay is rustic, the salt pans are surrealistic. Salt has been panned in Bonaire for more than 300 years; salt from Bonaire preserved the cod that fed Catholic Spain and Portugal on Fridays, and in turn earned the money that paid for African slaves to work the salt pans. The pans are periodically filled with salt water from the sea and then dammed shut. The sun evaporates the water, leaving the salt, which today is pushed up into piles 100 feet high. These stylized mountains stand as a range, and when the wind is low and the ponds around them flat, they create a strange reflected landscape.

During the slave trade, sailing ships would anchor close in to the coast and receive salt from small lighters. A human chain of workers, men and women, would carry baskets of salt on their heads to these smaller boats. They sang shanties, as they toiled. An arriving ship would know where to anchor because obelisks (tall fingerlike spires of masonry) marked various anchorages according to a color system. Black, white or red obelisks indicated the grade of salt available at each place. You can see, and enter, the small slave huts where many people spent their too-short nights.

The pans are important in the region’s ecosystem, enticing many flamingos to live here, but they are very cautious birds and will consider you intruding at a range of 200 feet (photographers need a telephoto lens). A sight I find flamboyant is a line of flamingos flying over the sea. They are powerful birds in the air and routinely fly down to Curaçao to sample the salt lagoons there. Flamingos fly in single file, like a long pink serpent, rising and falling low over the dark blue water; it’s an arresting vision.

So, why should you call in at Bonaire? It’s cruiser friendly (they really are glad to see you), it’s laid back but pleasantly vital and it’s a protected natural gem, above and below the water.

There’s a tradition on Bonaire that when a young boy likes a particular girl he tosses pebbles at her. The Curaçao people, of course, find this wildly provincial, but I find it charming. So consider this story a pebble tossed to the island. Prepare to be wooed by its spell.

New Cruising Guide for the Island

Frank Virgintino’s new A Cruising Guide to the ABC Islands will clearly appeal to any yachtsman cruising Aruba, Bonaire or Curaçao because of its detailed charts and pilotage suggestions. He has been to every place he mentions, and this authority, combined with his favorite-uncle voice, is irresistible. The big bonus, though, is that this book would also be a real asset to any land-based visitor, so comprehensive is Virgintino in his touristic and cultural overviews of each island. It’s a great gift for anyone heading this way.

Duncan and Irene Gould completed their circumnavigation, spent a winter in Canada, then moved back to the tropics to rent vacation apartments in Bonaire coralseaapartments.com. This article first appeared in the April 2014 issue of Cruising World.

Bonaire waterfront

Bonaire Map

Lac Bay, Bonaire

Duncan and Irene Gould

Bonaire Flamingos

Bonaire Iguana

Karel’s Bar

Lac Bay Party Shack, Bonaire

Lac Baai, Bonaire

Laughing gulls

lorikeet

iguanas in Bonaire

Bonaire Resort

main street of Kralendijk

Steel Cutter Moose

Fisherman’s Hut

Bonaire Slave Huts

Klein Bonaire

Bonaire West Coast

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