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.

I finally decided on a photo hosting site. Though it’s not all that inexpensive at around US $60/year, SmugMug is well organized and provides all of the features I was looking for. It’s very user-friendly and it will make posting and linking to pictures much easier for me. I’ve already redone the previous galleries and will start posting the photos I’ve had backlogged for some time now.

Here are some pictures of the kayaks we got. I’d wanted to get a couple of touring kayaks for use on the lake. Importing from the US or elsewhere would have been far too expensive, so I searched around and found a guy in Argentina who makes fiberglass kayaks. The guy’s name is Ricardo and his company, SDK Kayaks is located outside Buenos Aires. I decided that if I was going to make the effort to get two, I might as well get four and have extras to rent or use in groups. In the end, I don’t know if fiberglass was the best choice for someone who has little kayaking experience or lives in an area where roads are rough. Fiberglass kayaks are fairly delicate as we found out when we got back to Coyhaique and discovered that two of them had been cracked in transit somewhere. Not sure if it was our fault or the shipping company’s, but thanks to my kayak-knowledgeable friend, Jerome, and a Spanish guy named Diego who subsequently rented a kayak from us, they were easy enough to patch up and will only suffer from some cosmetic blemishes.

We had the kayaks shipped to Comodoro Rivadavia, on the Atlantic coast due east from Coyhaique. It’s a long, hot, dusty drive across barren scrub land, but Argentina is always a welcome adventure. Customs told us not open them until we’d gotten them back to Coyhaique and had them approved, so we’ll never know at what point during transit the two were cracked. Ricardo sent us the paint to patch them up and I got the rest of the materials locally.

The kayaks are definitely nice. They row smooth and fast and are comfortable. Ricardo did a nice job building them. I flipped one on the far side of the lake, luckily near shore, and so learned my lesson about being prepared. I’ve got a lot of practicing to do, but it’s a hobby that will provide good exercise and a different perspective on the natural world, so I plan to learn as much as possible despite the relatively short warm-weather season down here.

As always, click on the photo to check out the image gallery.

I have slacked off far too much in posting pictures of our “progress”(es).  I can initially blame things on the fact that our old Nikon digital camera finally gave up the ghost, for which it won some last minute points with me (I hated that thing).  Anne brought us replacements though in December (Panasonic FZ50 for me, Canon A630 for Claudia), so I have no excuse for not posting since then.  Since the last time I posted, Claudia has advanced to 6 months and Porota is active as ever.  The doctor says she has long legs.

We are advancing slowly but surely at the lake and getting to know people in and around Coyhaique.  We got our kayaks (which is pretty much just a taunt to Claudia at the moment since she can’t use them) and have started renting and learning how to use them.  I flipped on the far side of the lake but fortunately was next to shore and accompanied by a Spanish guy who rented one to row from Puerto Chacabuco to Laguna San Rafael, a ten day trip (he flipped in 10 foot waves on the second day, two miles from shore and had to mayday for rescue - a boat from a salmon farm picked him up in ten minutes, fortunately).  Still, they are very nice kayaks and despite the fact that two were cracked in transit around the cockpit (our friend Jerome helped us fix them easily enough) we are pleased to have them and plan to get a lot of use out of them exploring lakes and fjords in the area, once we get comfortable that is.  We got them from an Argentine guy named Ricardo who makes them in his shop outside Buenos Aires.  Check him out at:  http://www.sdk-kayaks.com

I am looking for a better way to post pictures, so if anyone stops by here and has a recommendation (Justin?) I would be much obliged.  I’ve been using a plugin through Dreamweaver and Fireworks (after resizing through Photoshop) but I’ve been getting errors since changing cameras and it’s too lengthy a process anyway.  I’m happy enough with editing in Photoshop but would like to use an online gallery service to host pictures.  It would have to offer an easy way of creating specific galleries and linking to them.  PBase looks like the most promising solution at the moment, but if anyone can recommend another reasonably-priced image hosting service I’ll be sure to check it out.

That’s all for now, but I have photos from Anne’s trip, Pete, Pam, Cynthia and Tim’s visit, kayaks, work progess at the lake and, of course, Claudia and “Porota”, which I’d like to post soon.