From: jhc@world.std.com (John HC)
Newsgroups: rec.scuba
Subject: Patagonian Trip Report (long)
Date: 14 Dec 1992 18:07:30 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

From November 29 to December 5, I visited Patagonia, the land at the
end of the world. It was my first time there. I spent a day in Rio
Gallegos, Argentina at the beginning and at the end of the trip. I
passed the rest of the time in Punta Arenas, Chile.

Though I did manage to arrange for a day of diving, this wasn't really
a dive trip. Just hours before I left New York, my wife persuaded me
to leave my dive gear behind. It weighed about 50 pounds, and I had no
idea where I would be staying or how I would get around once I
arrived. The prospect of hauling the extra, heavy bag around the
southern end of the world lost all its appeal once I hauled it up to
the third-floor apartment of our New York friends.

This trip had two purposes: to finally see Patagonia, a part of the
world that has attracted me for no known reason for as long as I can
remember, and to figure out if it was worth visiting for a real dive
trip.

I picked Rio Gallegos as my destination because it is a jumping off
place for everywhere else in southern Patagonia. From there I could go
just about anywhere. I also picked Rio Gallegos because I wanted to
see a real river down there.

If you're wondering how it would even occur to me that diving might be
possible, let alone interesting, in Patagonia, I suggest you pull out
an atlas and take a look at the bottom of the South American
continent. The salient feature is water. The other apparent feature is
mountains. If your atlas includes demographic mapping as well, you'll
note the area is very sparsely populated. In short, different
watersheds wherever you turn and almost nobody around to foul them.
Maybe *that's* where I'd find clean water!

This first trip to Patagonia provided more socio-cultural than aquatic
explorations for me. I had never been to South America, let alone
Argentina or Chile; I hadn't spoken Spanish in 12 years; and I had no
agenda other than my flight schedule and my hotel rooms my first two
nights. My first discovery was that I was no longer fluent in Spanish.
The second discovery was that Patagonia is a tourist magnet for
Europeans. The third was that, by showing up at the end of Spring
rather than during the summer, I had a broad choice of accommodations
at pre-season prices.

The language problem resolved itself within four days. (The
realization came to me when I asked myself, "Why is everybody speaking
so slowly and clearly to me? And how come they aren't asking me to
repeat anything anymore?") That  Europeans head to Argentina and Chile
like Americans flocking to Europe provided one very significant
advantage: there is a remarkably solid infrastructure for
accommodating visitors. In addition, most of the tourists seem to be
hikers and climbers intent on visiting the immense glaciers and
mountains of western Patagonia. The tourist trade speaks of these
people as "folks who carry no more than $5, a change of underwear, and
camping gear." As a consequence, much of the tourist-oriented business
is relatively inexpensive. Clean hotel rooms can be had for $20, you
can feed yourself quite well for $15 each day, and transportation is
inexpensive. (The bus trip between Rio Gallegos and Punta Arenas,
which lasts about 6 hours -- including time spent at the border
bureaucracy -- costs $20.)

I found a dive shop in Punta Arenas on my first evening in town. It
was closed, so I went back the next day. That shop did not rent gear,
nor did it arrange dive expeditions, but they put me in touch right
then and there with a guy who runs a dive school. We met that evening,
and we went diving the next day in the Strait of Magellan at a site
about 75 kilometers south of Punta Arenas.

The air temperature was about 75 degrees. The sky was partly cloudy.
The water temperature was about 53 degrees. The shore was rocky. There
was a band of kelp 20 yards wide about 50 feet from shore. The water
was calm.(1)

The text that follows is directly from my trip notes:

I believe I went through a test yesterday, and I guess I passed. Oscar
had my tank all set up for me, and when I approached the tank closest
to me, he told me the *other* one was mine. Ok.

He and I go down together, descending to 60 feet along the bottom
through the kelp stalks. I notice that I'm really having to *work* to
get air. At first I think, "Oh, well, this reg must be 15 years old."
But then it gets still *harder* to draw air, even when I ascend 10
feet. "Gee, I wonder if I might be out of air?" So I pull the reserve:
BOOM! AIR!

The tank I've been given must have had only 300 pounds of air (600
with reserve) in it. I signal to Oscar that I am out of air and make
as stately an ascent as I can, given my immediate mistrust of Chilean
equipment. I'm thinking, "Hell, if 3000 psi is really only 300 psi,
how much is a 300 psi reserve, really?" I feel Ok once I can see the
surface 30 feet above me and I realize I'm breathing air as easily as
off a full tank.

When we get to the surface, I see we're on the outside of the kelp
belt. Great! A surface swim through an inpenetrable blanket of
vegetation. Wonderful.

But no, I'm mistaken. Oscar tells me we're going to swim under the
kelp. I'm thinking, "Do I really want to drop down to 60 feet on <300
pounds of air and swim through a forest of kelp as thick as the
milfoil in Dudley Pond with this guy who might have just killed a less
experienced diver with this little test?" Well, no, actually, I don't.
But then I think, "What would I do if I were solo in this situation?"
And I realize that I would do exactly as Oscar proposes, being very
aware that, with the first hard draw on the reg, I would have 5
breaths to get to the surface. The kelp belt is easier to swim through
from below, and in all likelihood, I'll make it without any problem.

So down we go. We make it back to shallow water with the air flowing
easily on demand. When we stand up, I tell Oscar that I think I must
have been breathing a *lot* and that I must be nervous and that one of
my personal flaws is that I never know when I am nervous -- while
remarking to myself that I'm telling this little lie quite nicely --
but the regulator never lies. Oscar's expression tells me he doesn't
know what to make of me. I guess he has expected to humiliate me,
rescue me, and spend the rest of the day covering me with his wing.
(Actually, this only occurs to me later and is borne out by subsequent
non-diving events.) The fact is that I remember quite well my
prodigious air consumption on the wreck dive in the Baltic with Matti,
so I am being *very* careful to control my breathing. Oscar was
probably very surprised that I made it all the way down to 60 feet on
that little bit of air. This retired Chilean Marine Sergeant Major,
Commercial Dive Instructor, Sky Diving Instructor, and Mountaineering
Instructor has a devious cruel streak that I need to watch out for.

We paddle around in 10-15 feet of water for about 20 minutes until I
get my first hard breath, and I wonder more than once if I even had
300 psi in the tank to begin with.

They give me another tank, which Bergaro checks and declares full.
Bergaro joins us with a tank containing 2000 psi. After about an hour
of tooling around between 65 and 20 feet, I start to get cold. When I
surface, I see Bergaro sitting on a rock, taking off his tank. He says
he's out of air. I offer him my tank, which still has air plus the
reserve, and he seems grateful. I haul his tank ashore.

Underwater, where visibility ranges between 10 and 20+ feet (depending
on the sun and other things I never figured out), I took few pictures.
I really need a strobe and a 15mm or 20mm to shoot down there. I left
the camwra ashore on the second dive. That was a mistake.

Small snails of iridescent purple; magnificent red urchins (erizos),
which these guys love to consume; giant blue sea stars; red, yellow,
and pink sea stars the size of my hand that look exactly like the
five-pointed stars on the US flag; a sculpin-like fish with a dorsal
fin long enough to make it look almost like a rock eel; multicolored
whelks, drills, and other snail-like creatures of various sizes (which
make me think of Charlotte and Paul and of how many camera setups and
tanks they would have to bring to take advantage of this menagerie);
five different kinds of sponges, some of which look like what we have
in the North Atlantic; beautiful, tiny burrowing anemones with
transluscent white tentacles, each with a blood-red spot near the tip;
and limpets. The limpets are astonishing. Though some adhere to the
rocks like glued half-shells, many are open, something I have never
seen before. When open, these creatures stand on a stalk that looks
much like an anemone's. The stalk is about half as tall as the shell
is long, and its color varies from animal to animal. Small black cilia
emerge from the rim of the shell like fringe, and two "antennae" --
like those of a snail -- project from the front of the shell. I see a
*lot* of these limpets in 20-30 feet of water in varying stages of
wakefulness.

What else? The crabs. Rock crabs, huge spider crabs, and hermit crabs.
The rock crabs are small, and rather than camoflauging themselves like
a spider crab or wedging themselves into nooks and crannies among the
rocks, they hide under objects such as old shells, flat rocks, or
pieces of kelp leaf, which they pull over themselves to hide.

The hermit crabs are hilarious. Moving slowly over the bottom, I come
up to a piece of kelp lying over a rock, and suddenly there are about
a hundred hermit crabs of all different sizes falling onto the kelp
leaf and then rolling off toward the bottom like dizzy Keystone Kops.
I imagine these little crab voices screaming, "Run! Run for your life!
It's something BIG! Run!" This happens about ten times, and I never
figure out what the common denominator is. That is, I never get to the
point where I can look at something ahead of me and say to myself,
"There's where the hermit crabs are going to go crazy falling all over
themselves." I never figure out where they come from, either. One
second there's nothing but a kelp leaf, and the next second it's
raining hermit crabs. Maybe they're being dislodged by my exhaust
bubbles?

On the seaward side of some large rocks, I see colonies that resemble
cross sections of honeycombs. They are dull orange, which makes them
stand out against the gray of the rocks. The first few times I see
them, I think the mat of cylinders is the base of a creature or plant
that extends 3-5 inches from the center. Later I realize that the
creature or plant is a conch-like animal consuming the contents of the
cylinders. Each conch's shell is camoflauged with vegetation, and
there doesn't seem to be any consistency in the kind of vegetation
they choose. Their configurations and colors create a psychedelic
affect. This all comes to me when I encounter a large rock with lots
of honeycomb cross-sections -- each colony is about the same size --
and each has a different kind of "plant" growing out of its center. I

also see a colony that hasn't attracted a conch yet and another that
has been abandoned. This latter looks like a doughnut from a few feet
away, but on closer inspection I see that a conch has consumed the
innards of each cylinder in the center of the colony, leaving the
empty cylinders almost transparent. With the whole colony being about
8 inches in diameter, the dead cylinders in the middle form a circle
about 6 inches in diameter.

Really, there are so many gastropod-like creatures of different sizes
and types that they defy description. We need to go back with a
complete photography and video setup.

[end of dive notes]

I am planning on returning to Patagonia next year, with North American
gear and solid arrangements for transportation both on land and on the
water. I will probably arrange to hire a local fisherman to haul us
around for a week. I certainly will not deal with Oscar Ramirez again.
There is a lot of water around there, and I like the idea of diving
with the penguins, the sea lions, and the seals, which are all over
the place. (Sadly, there were none at the dive site I visited.)

If you're at all interested in joining me, send mail. If for any
reason I'm not available at GEMVAX::JOHNHC, you can always reach me at
jhc@world.std.com.



=====
(1) The Strait of Magellan is shockingly tranquil. Even with 20-knot
winds blowing, the waves in the strait would be only 4 inches high.
Though people talk about the stiff current flowing through the strait,
I never saw *any* sign of an appreciable current. The kelp fronds were
always placid on the surface, and there were almost no broken pieces
of vegetation washed ashore. I was treated to a video of a dive
course, and one scene showed 3-foot waves rolling ashore. The image of
these waves evoked moans from the two course graduates who were
watching the video with me. Apparently the video was taken on the day
they learned about "rough-water entries."



John H-C


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