Eyre Fjord and Pio XI Glacier

Europa’s way along the Chilean Channels and Fjords brought her to join one of the main waterways in the region, the ample Concepción Channel, one of the largest passages linking many smaller ones and several fjords to the Pacific Ocean.

Concepción, yet another name that evokes the old times of the Spanish Conquest and first attempts at dominion over those latitudes. It was first sailed by Ladrillero in 1557. Nine years earlier he was the first explorer from this country to survey the southern Chilean coasts and the pioneer in navigating the Strait of Magellan in the opposite direction than Hernando de Magellan did. Later on, in 1579 the channel was named when Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa sailed the area on the eve of the celebration of the Immaculate Conception.

Ladrillero was the one who in 1558 took possession of the Strait of Magellan for the governorate of Chile and the King of Spain. His expedition started in 1557, and although not completely successful, set the base for one of the most aspiring projects of the Spanish Crown, to close the passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, thus safeguarding the entire American Pacific coast from any threat to its domains. An assignment that, to be completed, had to wait until the 1580s and the explorer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa.

Concepción gives way to Canal Wide and soon we enter Eyre Fjord. The day is clearing up, rain inevitably keeps falling and of course the wind blows often up to 30 kn from our nose.

But after almost 120 nautical miles facing similar characteristics of wind and weather, we have made it here.

As the morning hours pass, the front of the mighty Pio XI starts appearing at the head of the fjord. It will still take a while to get all the way there, but for those of us that venture out to the rainy and windswept decks, it slowly starts to acquire its real dimensions.

A tongue of ice falling down the mountains from the Southern Patagonia ice field for 64 kilometres. Its icy surface covers 1304 square kilometres. Once the ice reaches sea level, flowing into the waters of the fjord, the glacier front rises vertically over 50 meters in an array of fort-like characteristics for over 3.5 kilometres in width.

With these impressive proportions, Pio XI is the largest and longest glacier of all South America, and with it of all the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica.

Definitely worth the 25 nautical miles detour and the steaming against the wind to come here and have a good look at it.

Europa drifts at about 400 meters from the vertical front when the boats are readied for an exploratory landfall in the area. Seas and winds have abated, nevertheless dark clouds loom over the heights of the mountains and the glacier. Luckily, the heavy rainfall gives a break this afternoon.

At either side of the glacier, north and south, the white clear ice becomes loaded with sediments, the lateral moraines. They reach the thick woods that grow all along the mountains and cliffs that nest the glacier. A good look reveals a promising spot at the southern sector of the monumental glacier. The ice here slopes up more gently, and at the foot of it there is a beach and a flat sedimentary area from a fast-flowing meltwater braided river.

The ice seems to have been eating up terrain from the forest around. Tree trunks are spread all over, some still stick out of the active moraine, others have been recently de-rooted. The most dramatic of glacial sceneries.

Here all differs from the succession we have seen so far in other fjords as we walk away from the proximity of glacier fronts, consisting of bare rounded eroded rocks recently emerged from under the receding ice cover, then a profusion of lichens and mosses that give way to grasses and bushes and at the back of all forested areas. The landscape around Pio XI shows convincing evidence to corroborate the studies which tell us about its front actually being advancing in a semi-continuous manner since the 1950s, with some intervals of recession in between. A contrasting behaviour to most of the world’s glaciers nowadays.

An inauspicious morning heading straight into the wind under pouring rain and low visibility. A promising improvement of the weather while nearing the most extensive of the meridional glaciers. The most dramatic of the landings at an advancing edge of the Campo de Hielo Sur. Untouched terrain under the forces and pressures of the ice, carving landscapes and reshaping the old grown Patagonian forests.

On the way out, soon some spring aloft to unfurl canvas. Fore Topsails, Topgallant and Course make for a good downwind sailing evening all along Eyre Fjord.

But we sail in the maze of the Chilean channels. Different waterways open in different directions, now the wind offers good chances for sailing, soon it funnels against us. It was just before the end of the day when Europa reaches the end of Eyre Fjord and turns to starboard. Sails doused and furled, braces sharpened, engines roar again to make way north to Charteris Pass and Grappler Channel.