March 2 - Cruising through Canal White and arrival in Puerto Natales

This morning we continued our scenic cruising of the fjords. The views are spectacular and I'm not sure how many photos I can take of snow covered mountain peaks rising out of the water. It is, like Antarctica, hard to capture the scenery here and the scale of everything. The wind this morning was blowing extremely hard, reaching gusts of 59 knots, and I spent a good portion of the morning watching the wind move across the surface of the water creating interesting swirls and patterns. When we arrived at Canal White, the wind was still very heavy. Canal White is a narrow canal that you have to transit at just the right tide because the currents run fast. Our plan was to go through the canal in zodiacs, tuck in at a perfect vantage point, and watch the ship navigate through the narrows. The wind forced us to cancel that plan, as there was no way we could launch the zodiacs. Instead, we watched the transit from the top deck. It was pretty incredible as the ship had to do a few "S" turns to avoid the kelp and the small islands - all this in high winds and high current. Impressive. I've attached a photo of the ship going through the narrow passage.



Canal White

In the afternoon, we arrived at Puerto Natales for a planned tour of the Milodon Cave. The wind was still blowing, so we were unable to pull up to the dock and anchored the ship just off shore. Just as we launched the zodiacs to take passengers to shore, we got called back to the ship and told that the harbor was closed and we did not have authorization to drive the zodiacs. Conveniently, they had a tender already waiting for us that we could charter for the low low price of $900.00. After much arguing, we did take the tender, and then guess what?? Once we returned back from our afternoon excursion and the tender took us back to the ship (another $900.00 or maybe the first price was round trip????), they miraculously opened the harbor for our zodiacs. Hmmm..sounds fishy to me.

The tender they sent was interesting. It was actually an old sailboat that was converted on the inside with tables and benches to be a tourist boat for day sailing. I've attached a photo of it approaching the ship. We didn't really know what to do with it when it got to the ship, as it was not the type of "tender" we were expecting.


Our Chilean Tender

The trip to the Milodon Cave was fun and a good way to get a leg stretch. The milodon is like a giant sloth creature that lived a long time ago and fossil remains were found in the cave. I've attached a photo of me and the replica of the milodon - scary, huh?


Lori and Milodon

We took a short hike through the cave and on our drive to and from learned about the area of Punta Natales. They are building many new hotels in the area hoping for an increase in tourism (since Torres del Paine National Park is so close), but as of yet there are no commercial flights into the area, just private planes. The drive from Punta Arenas is about three hours, so this may slow down their tourist boom.