Now that fall is here, I should probably recap the summer advances. Most of what we accomplished this summer consisted of things remaining from our overestimating last year’s objectives. Still, it fells like we got a lot done, or so says my back, which is getting a good rest now. We got the shelter built and now have a more permanent camp base at the lake. I hauled the old tents to a dumpster; two seasons of wind, sun and rain had wrecked them beyond repair. The new shelter has already withstood some nice winds with no problem, but it is fairly well protected on two sides. Cristian and his cousin helped me with that project. All the wood was cut from dead coigue or a couple of tepa trees we felled (the tepa was only used where it won’t get wet as it is more prone to rot than coigue).

We also put the finishing touches on both docks. I actually had to add a whole second level to the base camp dock, as I had misunderestimated how high the lake would rise (misunderestimation seems to be the common denominator in general). I had to cut up 15 more beams plus a bunch of floor boards, but there were a couple logs left over from other things that provided all the lumber. One of the next objectives will be to build steps from the dock to part way up the hill. Mom got that project underway.

We finally got a pickup truck. It was sorely needed and immediately proved itself useful. It’s a 2001 Toyota Hilux. With it, I was able to bring a lot of firewood back to town for the winter and it also greatly facilitated the construction of the first four bridges. After finishing the shelter and docks, the bridges were next on the agenda. I was trying to figure out how I could co-opt/trick someone into helping me with that when the phone rang one day. It was my buddy Patricio, who did our survey last year. The owner of the company’s son had just got into town and was looking for an internship with a startup tourism project. To make a long story short, he plans to do an internship with us next season but in the meantime volunteered to help me with things like bridge construction, firewood hauling and whatever general hard, manual labor I needed help with. Talk about a gift horse. We got four bridges done in a couple of weeks!

We had amazing weather all summer (at least, from January through March) and it is still fairly good half way into April, though a bit overcast most of the time. Didn’t do much fishing this year, as the late afternoon “return trolling to the car” was replaced by “return with load of firewood to the truck”.� Now, I’m resting up in town for a while and focusing on other priorities for the moment.

Click on the photo to open the gallery in a new window.

We finally finished the basic structure for both docks, beating the rising lake by a couple of hours. I still have to nail the floorboards down and add a couple of pylons onto the back of the campsite dock, but the main work is accomplished and just in time.

As I have said before, I have a new appreciation for how much time and effort goes into jobs like these, so I’m happy with the way things turned out despite the fact that I originally thought I would have the docks finished over a month ago. I had Muttell help out with more lumber, as well as Cristian who once again provided great assistance in hauling lumber and helping me build the campsite dock. Claudia’s cousin Cecilia’s husband, Marc, helped me haul some lumber and finish off the first dock during two non-contiguous days while visiting. He got to see the best and worst of the weather at our land on those days.

I’ll put the finishing touches on the two docks when we get another stretch of good weather. In the meantime, I need to start planning out how to go about organizing the bridge work, who I’ll get to help, etc. All of the lumber is cut and hauled into place (more or less) but needs to be painted. I also need to cut up a bunch of 1 meter lengths of tree trunk that will serve as bank reinforcements for each bridge. I’ll be working all winter on these, no doubt

As always, click the image to open the photo gallery.

We finally finished the bulk of the wood for the bridges and docks after two straight weeks of cutting and hauling. The man I hired to help, Muttell, turned out to be a great decision. He is one of the most experienced chainsaw artists in the area and proved to be a responsible and hard worker. I learned a lot by watching and asking questions. There is no way I could have sawed up that much lumber in two weeks. In the end, he sawed up everything for the bridges (beams, supports and floorboards) while I sawed up the posts for one of the docks after observing how he went about the process. I had already sawed up the floorboards for the dock using the Logosol M7 portable sawmill that my buddy Claudio Adriazola, the Makita rep in town, has lent me.

We are building seven short bridges to cross drainage ditches on the access road we are building behind Alejandro’s house. We decided to go with 3 10cmX10cmX3m beams per bridge, plus crosspieces and floor boards. That meant that a lot of trees would need to be sawed up. Since we want to limit the number of live trees we are cutting down, we started by looking for usable deadwood, both in the forest and along the shore. The lake is at its low point right now and the shore is strewn with old fallen trees, most of which spend a good part of the year under water. A lot of them have very nicely preserved wood inside and we were able to get a lot of beams and boards out of these. Muttell also found a number of usable trees lying on the forest floor (actually, slightly elevated off the ground), so we limited the number of live trees we cut to just a few. All of the wood is Coigue (Nothofagus Dombeyi). One of the first trees we cut into on the shore turned out to be Tineo, or Palo Santo as it is called here. It is a beautiful wood, far too good to use for bridges, so we cut it up into some nice slabs. I hope to be able to dry it properly and make a dining room table and other furniture out of it.

Of course, sawing the lumber was only half the job - the other half was getting it out of the woods or shore, onto the raft, hauling it across the lake, and then getting it to the site of the bridges. I should have guessed ahead of time that the jeep would only last long enough to crap out on the beach as soon as we were ready to haul the first load. One of the locals has a team of oxen, so I was able to hire them and get the wood off of Alejandro’s beach and over to the access road in two days. We still have at least one more day of hauling, but it doesn’t seem like such a daunting task anymore now that we’ve done it a few times.

In the end, I think I’ve more than made up for all of the hard labor I may have ever weaseled my way out of in the past, but it was all rewarding and I even learned to saw beams “al pulso” (by hand). I know this is only the beginning, but all in all, I’d say we’re off to a good start.

As always, click on the image to open the photo gallery.

Here was todays adventure - in the morning Cristian (our neighbor to the south side of our property) and I hauled a bunch of the boards we’d sawed up over the past few weeks across the lake and built a raft using four of the styrofoam floats I got for the docks. We used a total of eight 4m length boards and eight 3m lengths (I’ll post photos of the milling process before long). It took exactly a one-kilo bag of nails to put the thing together. The last nail we put in was the last one in the bag. In the afternoon, we towed the raft across the lake to Cristian’s place, where he had an old jeep that they’d taken across on a makeshift stryofoam raft a couple of years ago to use for hauling firewood. He wanted to get the jeep back to town to sell it, and I wanted to borrow it before that to haul all of the 10inx10inx3m beams I’m having cut for the seven small bridges I need to build on our access road.We towed the barge (which ended up being called El Colono) tug-boat style, one boat on each side. You can’t see that in the pictures because I had to break away in order to take them, but it takes two boats to steer the raft. With one, you end up going around in circles. The jeep had been sitting in the rain for a year so I took our car battery. Crisitian siphoned out the two liters of gas that remained in the tank into a soda bottle and plugged the fuel pump directly into the soda bottle. We cleaned out the spark plugs, which were all gunked up, and the jeep turned over just as soon as Cristian gave the fuel pump a few shakes. We got it onto the raft with no problem and got the raft unstuck from the shallow water with no small amount of muscle. The raft didn’t creak or moan once on the return trip across the lake. Needless to say, I have no doubt that these floats were the right way to go for the docks.

As always, click on the photo to open the gallery.

One of the main goals this summer is to build two docks. We’ll need one for where we park the car and another over where we plan to build. I decided that floating docks are the way to go, as the level of the lake rises and falls somewhat throughout the year. Since there are a lot of salmon farms in the fjords around here, I hoped to be able to get a hold of second hand materials. At least for the styrofoam floats, we were successful (all the salmon farms float their docks and walkways on styrofoam blocks).

I spent a couple of days looking around Puerto Chacabuco and Aysen. My friend Pablo remembered seeing the pile we ended up getting the floats from and a guy he knew from one of the salmon fisheries told us of another place. That one ended up being about as close as I’ve seen in Chile to a white trash residential dump and the guy could have offered to pay us to haul the things out of his yard instead of raising the price a dollar per float from one day to the next. I almost thought we’d have to get the floats from him anyway, but we finally got a hold of Ruperto, who is probably the busiest man in Aysen, and he was happy to sell me much better floats for far less than the redneck.

Ruperto also had steel walkways, but wanted four hundred dollars a piece (1m x 5m). I figure I’ll need at least 8 pieces to build the docks I want, so that was way out of my range, though probably not a bad deal as new these things go for over $2000. Anyway, I figure it will be much cheaper to build my own, even if I have to buy a welding unit and learn how to weld. I also ended up getting a marine buoy from Ruperto.

This was actually the “hook” I used to get him to sell me the floats cheap. I had first talked to him about buying some walkways (until I found out their price) and he said that I could throw the floats in with them if I wanted. So, after I told him I’d think about it, I called back and told him I was interested in the buoy. He said sure, and that for an extra forty bucks I could load the truck up with floats. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the buoy, but it’s bigger than Alejandro’s and no doubt it will find its way into some plan or other down the line.

We ended up getting two truckloads of floats because I don’t think one would have been enough. On the second trip Chris Getz helped out. He is the first of the Antarctic crew to pass through this year on his way back from Palmer Station. He took us out to dinner and helped out with the second load of floats and in return we almost got him stuck out in the middle of the Pampa a day later, but our Forester is pretty capable and we made it back alright.

I want the docks to have spaces for two boats and plan to put a roof over them, so I’m thinking of a squared off “W” shape. On the second trip we got some double-sized floats that had to be lifted by crane. Ruperto had a crane, so it was no problem. On the other end we just pushed them off the truck. The truck, by the way, was courtesy of a guy named Omar, who Alfonso (the man who sold us our boat) introduced me to recently. Omar knows how to weld, so I may get some classes from him. I hope to have the docks built before Christmas and I’ll keep looking around for walkways before I go and build them myself. I’ve heard that I might be able to get some cheap in Puerto Cisnes, so I may drive up there one of these days and check it out.

Don’t forget to click on the image to see more photos of the floats.