Pos: here
Loc: Caleta Chica
Acc: tent
Dist: 59,1 km
Start: 7:00 End: 19:00

Tomorrow:
Estimated landing: Caleta Punta Madrid
Estimated starting time: Right after sunrise
Estimated landing time: Well before sunset

A long day…12 hrs solid paddling on calm water, but no wind or low headwind. Not really exciting, honestly…but endurance is part of the trip.

Our neighbors last night let at least one of the generators running until late midnight, but earplugs did the job. Still we got up early, especially to find a poop spot in the darkness down at the rocky beach :-).

I’m wondering how such a desert community has their rules for that – if you see the garbage piles one may think they also have no rules, but I actually doubt it. About fifty people in such a small headland place need to poop somewhere every day, and all that with no running water or visible outhouses and quite hard rocky surface…

I’m also quite sure that fresh water is a rare good out here, so I really wonder about the hygiene…they were rolling a huge barrel yesterday up the hill, but I rather thought this was petrol for the generator on land or for the divers. Regarding all those questions, it is actually a pity I don’t speak more Spanish.

But regarding the Navy’s, it is probably good…I forgot to mention that they called Robert yesterday once before we were launching about where we’ll be going – not that we haven’t written it on our website yesterday! Then two Navy guys came in person to our launching spot and were asking the same stuff again…then a Navy boat stopped by us around lunchtime, to ask again the same crap…plus Robert got a bunch of more phone calls about our where about. I won’t call that efficient! This is just annoying and a waste of money and manpower. When the boat came by and started to ask again “next port”, I really got angry. Peter was again more patient and tried to answer…

We did again some seal slalom through an ocean littered with these funny guys – actually quite entertaining! We were joking where the expression “Navy Seal” for those US elite marine soldiers came from and were suspecting those seals were all carrying a web cam to follow our paddle…

After Punta Pichala, which had a small village with road access, there was Caleta Pisaqu Vieja with a wide river mouth entrance dividing the mountain range which was still dry, but it really had a bunch of *green* bushes! What a pleasant view! We were tempted to land, but decided to keep on going…we had better spend a nice afternoon there! Amazingly there were not even houses, though two cars…

Another headland had a bunch of houses and looked nice and sandy, but it had no landing! So we kept on paddling until we had a really sheltered landing at Caleta Chica.

Only two large fishing boats were anchoring in here, though we saw about six or seven on the horizon. One car was driving to the other beach and came back twice to unload bundles of sea weed. But besides that, we had the beach for ourselves! And quiet peace…!

Well, if Peter wouldn’t have done a few chores in the apsis with open tent door and headlight on we’d had less sand flies in here…something he has to learn…I learned that quite quickly to keep the tent door shut in New Zealand’s Fjordland, where there were myriads of those nasty tiny beast!