Sailing the Beagle Channel - Argentina

The Beagle Channel separates Tierra del Fuego with the extreme south of South America and Chile. It's so named after HMS Beagle, the ship we brits sent to do a study of navigation channels to try and gain a trade advantage over the pesky Portuguese and Spaniards way back in 1826.

The Beagle was captained by FitzRoy who took Charles Darwin along for the ride - both now have islands down in Antarctica named after them and Fitz Roy also has a whole mountain up north to his name! When they reached the Beagle channel on 29 January 1833, he wrote "many glaciers beryl blue most beautiful contrasted with snow.''
From Ushuaia, that's exactly what we thought when we set sail out into the icey waters of the Beagle and embarked on a long voyage to H Island, the southern most tip of Argentina. H Island is one of many settlements used by the Yamana people for shelter and food over 10,000 years ago, today its a wildlife sanctuary and is a haven for Cormorants and Wild geese. Indeed we saw hundreds of nesting pairs with their new babies, surviving the brutal wind , powerful sun and ice cold snow.
Before H Island we were treated to a close encounter with a very large colony of seals, they lounge around on the rocks all day before going into the sea to gorge on shrimp and king crabs. We found out later that these amazing mammals go out to fish in the deep ocean trenches at the very edge of the continental plates, and can swim at depths of up to 2000m. Amazing.
This was Maudies first experience on a proper sail boat and she loved it as the mighty winds kicked in and pushed the vessel to a 30 degree angle with the water, I on the other hand was a little scared about falling in the ice cold Antarctic waters.... but put on my bravest face and stiffed my upper lip in homage of Cpt. Fitz Roy.