180° South Page #3

from the lessons of history,

and that is the most important

of all the lessons of history."

There wasn't a harbor on the island

big enough to get in to fix our mast,

so we have to figure out how to do the repair

while anchored off-shore.

Allan got a wholesome old plan sailors have used

for centuries when forced to remast while at sea.

With no proper boat building equipment,

these archaic blueprints are our only option.

We spent a month getting ready to rehoist our mast,

and we've used everything we could get our hands on.

Our jury-rigged mast, half the size of the original,

weights over 500 pounds.

Stepping it to the deck in a rolling sea

could be disastrous.

One snap line could set off a chain reaction

bringing everything down, taking us out with it.

When the wind eases, we'll take our best shot.

If we fail, it will be the end of my trip.

Almost a month on Rapa Nui.

Soon, we will pull anchor and start

our 2,300 miles crossing to Chile.

I've always felt better on the move.

As soon as I learned to walk, I was running.

Today, though, I wouldn't mind staying here forever.

It's hard to leave a place I really connect with.

I tell myself I'll be back,

but I know there's a good chance I never will.

The good news is:

that question I asked Allan,

about whether or not

we had any extra space on the boat,

well, we do,

and Makohe is coming with me to Corcovado.

You get to the top of the wall,

and there's nothing up there.

Lionel Terray, the great French climber

calls it :
"The conquistadors of the useless".

Yes, the end result is absolutely useless

but every time I travel, I learn something new

and hopefully, I get to be a better person.

When you had a whole life in the outdoors,

you realize that you have a sense of responsibility

to protect these wild places.

After 16 days crossing from Rapa Nui,

we finally arrived in Chile.

This marks the end of Allan's

10,000 miles voyage from Seattle.

After years of being gone,

it's good to see he's made it home.

The Sea Bear will be months in port,

waiting for a new mast,

so Makohe and I decide to keep moving South.

Makohe has a friend from Pichilemu,

a town South of here.

He's a big wave rider named Ramon Navarro,

and his roots here go back to generations.

She thinks he'll have a place for us to stay,

and says his dad is a fisherman.

He might have ideas and find us

another boat to Corcovado.

And my mom said my grandpa

traded the land for one horse.

Right in here ?

Yes, all where my house is and all around,

50 acres, maybe more,

for one horse.

My all family comes from here,

so I've my roots in here and I see a lot around the world, what

happen when people come with money and change everything.

But we don't want to change

the best and most beautiful

place we have in here,

and we're going to fight for that man.

- Yeah.

Getting good surf on a travel has always come secondary

to the experience of just being on the road,

but on our second day, we woke up

to a big perfect swell and no one in the water.

The last wave I rode that day

turned out to be longest wave in my life.

I'll never forget it.

Ramon's parents watched the ocean change

when big commercial fishing companies arrived

and destroyed the local fisheries.

His father taught him to

work hard, live simply

and have a deep

respect for the ocean.

Ramon tells me that today,

the biggest threat they face are

the pulp mills popping-up along the Chilean coast.

Here I am, in the city

after 3 months at sea.

This place has more people than Los Angeles.

Right now, they're building a 3,000,000 ft shopping mall

and an office tower that will be

the tallest building on the continent.

I find myself thinking about the collapse of Rapa Nui.

Growth is inevitable, but can we maintain

this momentum in the long term ?

Being here reminds me of

my life back home

and I'm beginning to think about

my own use of resources.

Yvon told me before I left that

if we come to Santiago,

we should visit his friend

Juan Pablo Orrego.

He has made it his life's work

to stop urban sprawl wide Chile

and is fighting for the fading way of life

of its indigenous people.

My old friend Keith Malloy

has finally caught-up with me.

During our climb last year on "El Capitan",

he tore up his knee pretty bad

and had to get surgery.

On the mend, just before this trip, he caught

one of the biggest waves of his life at Mavericks.

I thought Timmy would be with him,

but he's off climbing somewhere,

so I hope he shows up

before we get to Corcovado.

We've come to a point where the road ends

and the land begins to break apart,

so we found a local boat to take us on

a last sleigh to Patagonia.

What I see here is the realization

of a dream 40 years in the making.

It all started with that trip

Doug and Yvon took here in 1968.

This is Conservacin Patagnica,

and it stretches as far as the eye can see.

For the last 18 years, Doug and

his wife Kris, along with Yvon,

have dedicated their lives to one of the largest

private land conservation project in the world,

Conservacin Patagnica.

In the early 90s, Doug and Kris

began raising money

and using their own life savings to acquire

large tracks of wild lands in Chile and Argentina.

With the help of hundreds of

passionate workers and volunteers,

they've succeeded in protecting

entire ecosystems

and fostering sustainable

farming and ranching programs.

Added together, the amount of land they've put in to

conservation is bigger than Yellowstone National Park.

I've arrived over a month late,

but Yvon and Doug are still here.

I heard about their project,

but I had no idea just how big it was.

I've always study their trip here

40 years ago as an adventure,

but now, I realize it was a turning point.

We didn't change our lives overnight,

but it had a big influence on me.

For me, it was the best trip of my life.

The all history of Latin America

is on the "conquistadores".

It's not much different from the States,

but in the States, at least,

we don't trust the government

and so we have a history of philanthropy.

So Doug comes down here

and he says :
"I'm gonna create a National Park

and I'm gonna give it back to you Chileans"

and they're going : "Give me a break !"

"People don't do that."

You know, there has to be another reason.

I think first and foremost,

people only protect those things they love

and you can't love something

unless you inherently identify with that.

That's certainly one of the reasons

we ended up here.

We have over 2,000,000 acres of land

put into conservation

and people think that's a lot of land,

but really we're on the loosing team here.

First of all, you never know

if you're doing the right thing,

you got to temper all your thinking that way,

but the way I see it, you know,

with land conservation, say, of this type,

is that the risk of something negative

coming from this, seems to be rather small

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