It’s never easy to leave a safe harbour, specially when sailing in high latitudes. It’s also hard to define what’s actually a good weather window and what’s not, when the weather is so unstable.

Our passage from Puerto Montt to Juan Fernandez islands was something about 600 nautical miles.
We have been watching the weather for over a week now, waiting for the right window to leave, but this window never really came and we we’re getting anxious. We were ready, Songster was ready. 

Well, the window to go to Juan Fernandez islands in one go didn’t come, but we did see the opportunity to leave Puerto Montt and sail to Valdivia! And we took it!

We left Puerto Montt in a sunny morning (after over a week of only rain), with a warm goodbye from our friends Marrit and Joost from SV Awa.
They were supposed to be leaving on the same window as us but they were not ready (they arrived in Puerto Montt two weeks ago and updated their batteries bank to Lithium, so they were still busy with that, unfortunately). Hopefully we’ll catch up at Juan Fernandez 🤞🏽

This first part of our trip to Valdivia was very relaxing. We only had to sail for 5 hours until the next anchorage, our last anchorage in Patagonia!
We anchored at Caleta Abtao at around 14h. This Caleta lays a few nautical miles away from Chacao channel. 

Chacao channel connects the open Pacific Ocean to Ancud bay, and can attain up to 8 kts of current during springs. For our luck we were on neap tide, so we could expect something around 3 or 4 kts max. 

According to our pilot book, we needed to be at the entrance of the channel 1h before high tide in order to cross the whole channel without current against us. And that’s why we anchored at Abtao, to wait for the right time.

We could have left on the next outgoing tide (7pm) but that would mean we would arrive in Valdivia at night (130nm away from the channel).
We ended up taking the next one, at 6am (ok we didn’t wake up that early and we left more like at 8am 🫣). That would allow us to arrive in Valdivia during the day light 🙏🏽
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The anchorage was beautiful and we had a good time there :)

Puerto Montt to Valdivia (Part 1)

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