Explore Sailing Voyages in Chile 🇨🇱

The time in Valdivia was really special and our social life was very active! We got reunited with Rolf and Wolf from SV Boaty McBoatface, Harry and Mirri from SV Rantje and with Stef and Manon from SV Long John Silver! All of our Patagonia buddy boats were in Valdivia this week! With all this people stuck on the same marina for a couple of days, it’s easy to imagine how much we drank and ate together 🥳🥂🍻🍷 And we made the mistake that we know we cannot do.. we had way too many drinks the night before the planned departure 😵‍💫🫠 We were so hangover when we woke up that we questioned ourselves if we were actually really leaving. We thought it was stupid to miss a weather window because of being hangover and so we left. I know think it was stupid to leave if we were hangover 😂😅🫣 The beginning of the trip was sooooo rough with the forecasted big swell (3-4m waves) and the lack of wind, resulting in either a very wobbly ride with only sails or a bumpy ride with the engine on. As a result, I got terribly seasick as I never did before, and I could only vomit for the first 24h of the trip. But I had to do my shifts on Songster and I had to be full time mother as well. I think it was the most difficult day of my life 😅 I still don’t know how I managed it 🤣 Once the first 24h were passed, I was reborn! Not only the hangover was gone but also the waves 🤗🤗 But the forecast of the second day wasn’t the best. We were supposed to get something like 6h of headwinds, so we thought we would just do one tack east and then continue back to NW once the wind turned again. But the wind never seemed to turn. It stayed against us for almost one full day. We ended up doing a big detour east and the back west. When the wind turned back and we could adjust the course we realized we had done only 24nm towards our actual destination on the last 24h 😂😂 Luckily we love doing this and we didn’t mind about the extra sailing day that we added to our passage 🙃 The rest of the trip was great and with the warm sunny afternoons that we were longing for. We even wore shorts and t-shirts inside the green house (how we call the closed cockpit now 😂😂😂). On Friday morning (May 10th) we realised that we wouldn’t arrive at Robinson Crusoe before sunset of Saturday. So our best shot now was to hold on and not push at all, and try to arrive by Sunday morning after sunrise. Is was an easy task for Friday the whole day and Saturday, as the wind was relatively weak. We just enjoyed the slowing down and floated sometimes with 2-3kts of boat speed. We knew we had to be as slow as possible now because the forecast for Saturday night and Sunday early morning was with 30+ kts of wind from the back, and Songster would fly! I was nervous about the forecast, worried about the strong wind. The numbers can be very scary.

This blog is yet to be completed, but oh man! We did it! 35 days and we crossed the Pacific!!!! Now it’s time for some champagne 😃😃