Pos: here
Loc: Calbuco
Acc: Restaurant Kiel
Dist: 30,4 km
Start: 8:15 End: 14:10

I had a nice group of visitors last night 8.30 pm – a local woman with five kids came along to have a look. Yes, I need to learn more Spanish…but I remembered I had a bag of fruit jelly candies my stomach didn’t really like, so the best chance to use it was to give it to the kids! They were happy…but not me when I found a bunch of colorful candy papers next morning around my tent and in a line back to the houses…

Another painful (for the boat…) long drag down to the water over coconut size boulders with a lot of barnacles, and starting into yet another calm day. Still I felt I was paddling until luch against a light breeze and strong current, making only 3-4 km/h. My dry suit feels eventually quite warm, but keeping it wet it works more or less.

Before the narrow channel between Isla Puluqui and Isla Chidguapi they had a big department of a salmon breeding farm with about maybe 15-20 of those round floating cages. I was watching a few workers feeding the fish like fire fighters spraying water were they spraying fish food on the cages, carefully watched by sea gulls for pieces falling out of the net covered area.

After the salmon breeding station, the whole Canal Chidguapi was full of those lines with floats breeding mussels, hundred thousands of floats attached to lines of about 50-60 floats, grouped in fields of maybe 100 lines or such, and maybe there were hundreds of fields…I was eventually happy to paddle across open water again up to Isla Calbuco.

Not sure I was expecting a big village already…I picked the meeting spot from the end of a street marked on my chart, which doesn’t show any housing areas.

Joerg Bauer came with his friend Sally with her truck and his mother Helga to pick me up from there, saving 2 x 27 km of paddling back and forth into a dead end. Thanks a lot for the pick up! It took us a while to figure out the right strapping of the boat top the small truck, diagonal was easiest, but I was wondering how long it would last until the nose or tail would be cut off by a passing car or too close lantern pole…after few few km we stopped, and we eventually strapped the boat flat on the roof. This was working best!

My hosts own a very nice and fancy Restaurant, named by my birth town “Kiel”. Please check out their website! I got a room in Helga’s house, the senior owner. In those days, her daughter in law is running the restaurant and she retired.

After we called her daughter Meike in Denmark, who made the initial contact, Helga invited me for an early dinner in the restaurant after my compulsory shower, and later we had another yummy snack meal in her house, both accompanied with a glass of “Pisco Sour”, Chile’s national drink.

Thanks a lot for hosting me! I’m feeling almost like home talking German in “Kiel”…and was thinking of all the many thousands Restaurants “Athen” and Cafes “Venezia” or such exotic names existing in our country…how they must be feeling being emigrants and basically foreigners in Germany…