Tuesday and Wednesday (Feb 11th and 12th)

It is most interesting how empty the sea is and how it fills up as you approach land.

I have very dear friends who own a home on North Beach in Port Townsend. They sit on their porch facing north (with wine or other drink in hand, of course), and watch all the shipping on the Strait of Juan de Fuca go by. All of it. This includes everything going to Vancouver BC and all that enters and leaves Puget Sound. Seattle and Tacoma especially have huge container depots.

Also, each Sunday in summer you can watch the cruise ships stream by en route to Alaska for a week of sightseeing. Indeed, if you are in a small vessel you’ll want to hug the shore. Those behemoths can’t stop fast if you happen to be in the way. So many ships.

With all that traffic, one assumes you’ll see lots of ships as you sail out there. Not so. Ports are a highly unusual concentration of vessels. Out on the bounding main you rarely see anyone. My balcony is at least 50 ft above the water surface, so I can see a good eighteen to twenty miles for nearly 180o of horizon. Yesterday fairly near shore there was one vessel and moving at an angle to us. Today I see a container ship on the horizon moving more or less parallel to us. Other days at sea I’ll see nothing at all the whole day.

Understand, I am on the starboard side, so in theory I am observing only half the total number of ships that can be seen. Thus you should multiply sightings by two to get a better average. That is still remarkably close to nothing.

As we continue down the coast toward Montevideo and Buenos Aires, we are fairly far offshore, well beyond view of land. And we travel in regal isolation. I think I mentioned before a brief scene in a comedy where our doughty heroes are adrift in a rowboat. Asks the leader, “What do you see out there?” The reply, “Nothing but horizon.” “Then let’s row for the horizon,” and our hero picks up an oar.

Bird enthusiast that I am, I was hoping to see skuas and albatrosses and petrels and…. Alas, birds are as infrequent as the ships.

Tomorrow we arrive at Montevideo in Uruguay and the next day we hop across the Rio Plata to Buenos Aires.

Perhaps there there will be birds.