Travel with Indigo

In the more or less attractive town of Puerto Montt, I take one blue sky day to wander about its public market area.  There, stalls of fresh and smoked fish, mostly salmon, clams, scallops, and a variety of other seafoods, stand side by side, their owners hawking in a friendly but insistent manner.  Other stalls are stuffed with local made woolens of every description, jewjaws and gimcracks, dust collectors mostly.

That same afternoon, Toby, engineer Kyle and I board the motor vessel Atmosphere by invitation of her captain, a veteran of 30 years in the Chilean navy.  The boat is 160 feet, 800 tons, and newly built by the yard that will be doing our refit work.   It is designed to take fishermen up the Chilean canals flyfishing for salmon, which this area has in great abundance, and accommodate them in style for up to two weeks at a trip.  She is finely made but not a yacht by conventional standards.  Still the visit is worthwhile and we learn that the yard for our refit work is fully capable of building a high quality yacht, if not on the level of the Dutch.

Next day Indigo makes her way out of Puerto Montt and its enclosing gulf on our way to the refit yard at Valdivia, about 24 hours away.  The trip is mostly uneventful but somewhat rolly due to the lack of one stabilizer.  As night begins to fall, Toby slows Indigo to avoid hitting humpback whales.  The sea is covered as far as the eye can see with blow spouts from these creatures.  It’s an odd site to look around the ocean suface and see so many columns of whale blows.  We also see a school of small, black and white spinner dolphins doing acrobatics.

We arrive at the mouth of Rio Valdivia in the morning, enter the river and idle there for an hour awaiting the river pilot to join us, along with two technicians who will conduct baseline tests on vibration and noise.  These tests will be used to determine the nature of the work we’ll have done and, when the work is complete, whether it has been beneficial.

The day is glorious as Indigo makes her way up river, surrounded by heavily forested hillsides, a few brightly painted homes, some agriculture, and saltmarshes.  Seals gambol and waterfowl circle overhead, seemingly oblivious to our intrusion.  Ten miles upstream, we reach the industrial shipyard, quite out of place in this scenic wonderland reminding me of the Austrian countryside.  Now tied up to the yard’s bulkhead where ships and yachts await hauling out, we complete our preparations for the two month work period Indigo will need before she sets off across the Pacific.

In just two days, I’ll board a plane and return to Jacksonville after being gone more than four months.  It’s a change I look forward to but not without some regret.  I’ve loved every moment on Indigo.  Through fair seas and foul, times spent with friends aboard both new and old, great meals, friendly and professional crew, scenic wonders, it has been all I could have wished for, and I’ll be eager to return.  Still I’ve missed Kitty and Grant and our friends at home and in the Bahamas, golf games with buddies, quiet times in our condo, dinners out with good friends, and the now quieter challenges of the office.

While Indigo is here in Valdivia, Toby and Geraldine will be off to Australia for their wedding and honeymoon, and all of us wish them well and a safe and speedy return.  Tonya, our wonderful stewardess, and the two Kyles (aka Shaggy and Diesel) will remain here along with a Uruguayan project manager, Roberto, we’ve hired to oversee the refit work.  The two Kyles will alternate taking much needed and deserved vacations as the work progresses.

I’ll miss the whole crew while I’m gone.  Living together with them these last months, though in close quarters and at all hours of day and night, has been a real pleasure for me.  We’ve each tried to stay out of the others’ hair, we’ve all been scrupulously polite and fair minded.  There have been no cross words exchanged, at least that I can recall.  They need the time to recharge, to explore Chile and to complete all the refit work.  I leave knowing Indigo is in competent and professional hands.

For now, until we resume again some time in late May or early June, I bid you a fond farewell from Indigo.  Stay tuned.