Pos: here
Loc: Puerto Santa Domingo
Acc: tent
Dist: 50,7 km
Start: 8:15 End: 18:20

A perfect blue sky today all day – not a single shape of a cloud anywhere on the horizon. I think this is the first time that perfect in Fjordland.

Paddling out of my yesterday perfectly calm Canal Frodden already showed me the wind has turned to the east, and it was quite a wind! It made me choose to paddle outside of the Islas Gala, leaving the small scattered village of Puerto Gala on Island two and three to my right. It was still blowing from the east through the gaps!

But the eastern wind soon turned, and paddling around the Peninsula Milimoyu it was blowing now from the south west, a nice direction. The water was entertaining, but nothing like yesterday! A bunch of small fishing boats were driving around, sometimes coming out of the shelter of the land quite unexpected in front of my nose.

I turned to the north east, heading into the Canal Refugio, which all had perfectly calm water with a nice following breeze. All that with still warm sunshine – it was actually since long quite a nice day! A young guy in an open boat stopped briefly by for taking a picture, but sometimes I’m sorry I have to say”No hablamas Espanol…” . He seemed to head to one of those floating working platforms for the salmon industry.

I was aiming for this Puerto Santa Domingo, as it looked like it had a lot of sandy coast with the opening of the inlet like a river. So it was. There was even a housing site right in the middle of the bay, and a larger boat anchoring at the end. I chose the exit of the inlet, where I could easily paddle so far upstream that I could exit the water on a steep river bank spot on lowest tide. In this way I was avoiding dragging the boat about 100 meters over the rocks until I’d reach dry land. It seemed to be a popular, as easiest, landing site for smaller boats.

The civilization noise of the housing site included the noise of the electricity  generator, a chainsaw, and – some cow noises! I already saw a few cow pats around my nice grassy camp spot. It is the first time I can hear and see cows again after Argentine! Some how nice. Not the engine noises though.

I was clever enough to look for a small fresh water stream before I was camping tonight, as I was almost out of water, and found a small river on a rocky bank on the bottom of the steep walls of The Canal Refugio, paddling a bit off my way into a bay. I couldn’t see it, but could hear the small stream running between the rocks, and could climb out and find a reasonable spot to refill.

If I’d be paddling two or three km further, I’d have it easier…I found a larger stream running down the steep clean rocky walls, obviously used by bigger boats to fill up as well. They did install higher up a big plastic water tube reaching into the stream, so the end of the long thick tube hangs conveniently down into the water and the fresh water is running out through there. In case the opening does not catch water, there is always a rope installed that you can climb up…water refilling in the natural way made practically easy!

This was not the first natural water refilling site like that I found, but the first site since the beautiful Caleta Hornos in Argentine where the boating people were leaving huge graffiti on the clean rocky mountain walls…I almost assume those were yachting people, not local working people. But amazingly I didn’t see any yacht since…yes, since the southern glacier area! Only working boats.