Sailing adventure takes readers away

My first thought when picking up this adventure title was, “I’ve heard of it before but I really have no idea where in the world ‘Patagonia’ is.” The cover page, with its stormy seas next to snow-capped mountains, didn’t even help me. “How can a cold-looking place be called Fireland?”

Of course, Tierra del Fuego has a much nicer ring to it. The southern tip of South America is well known as a place of troubled waters but beautiful scenery for those brave enough to venture there. Magellan made a point of going there as he circumnavigated the globe. Cook was there too, as was Darwin.

Add Nicholas Coghlan to that prestigious list. Along with his wife, Jenny, the nationalized Canadian teacher and sailing enthusiast first travelled to Patagonia — the southernmost region of the Andes mountains — 33 years ago when he took a posting in Buenos Aires. A few decades later, he was serving on diplomatic missions with the Canadian Foreign Service in Central and South America, as well as Africa. They decided to take their sailboat back to the Beagle Channel and the Strait of Magellan to reflect on what being an explorer really means.

It’s an enticing prospect but one that is naturally fraught with all manner of unknown dangers and perils.

On their first trip there, he observed albatrosses and caught sight of the beautiful and frozen continent, Antarctica.

“But it was Patagonia,” he writes at the end of the introductory chapter, “that vast and underpopulated tract of land south of 40 degrees, uneasily shared by Chile and Argentina, that always drew us back.”

“You could spend decades exploring here; we decided we’d like to come back one day.”

If any paper lion out there ever dared to even consider what the boating life might be like, this tome should be essential reading. Of course, you could always set a sloop out on any still lake, but the open sea is a much different story. To maintain that kind of freedom, you must also accept the fact that, when trouble comes — and it will — you will be entirely on your own to handle it.

Along with his musings on the human condition and his remarks about the natural world, Coghlan also relates several stories about where he almost came to the end of his existence while on board the Bosun Bird, his 8.2-metre (27-foot) vessel.

One such anecdote involved the sail getting stuck, its luff blown in front of a mast step. This meant that it could neither be let up nor down. Worse, it was at risk of tearing itself to shreds.

Forced to climb the mast in 46 km/h winds, he was nearly unable to wrench it free, all the while hanging on for dear life as the keel rocked back and forth in the storm. To make it worse, he isn’t fond of heights and was suffering nausea at the same time.

“For a moment, I thought it wasn’t going to give,” he writes. “I leaned with all my weight and pulled so hard I thought the sail might rip. I gave a final desperate tug. I swung for a moment completely free.”

He banged back into the mast and slid down it, falling to a heap on the deck. Luckily, it worked and he lived to write about it and sail another day.