Pirates by Rob Fletcher

The swarthy figures around me cackled, chuckled and snarled in Spanish accents as rough as the wine in their chipped enamel mugs. As the sun beat down and I drifted in and out of their conversation I had time to reflect that a plastic bag’s worth of clams, fresh from the ocean and eaten straight from their shell, was by no means my standard breakfast. Nor, I thought hazily, did I usually wash down my morning meal with red wine.

Yet, despite the rich food, the outlandish nature of its providers, and the fact that I lacked the support of an English-speaking companion, for the first time since moving to Chile I felt truly at ease.

After two solid months in Santiago, the country’s depressingly Western capital, I’d been itching to get out of the city and away from the smog, but had thus far been thwarted by the travails of a six-day week. Fortunately, help was at hand from Bernardo O’Higgins; the man who’d liberated the people of Chile from their Spanish oppressors was now freeing a Scotsman from the tyranny of teaching. Thanks to the holiday which celebrated the country’s independence from Iberia, I was able to flee the classroom and escape the exhaust-filled air.

Los Vilos, a small fishing village in Chile’s Central Littoral, was my chosen destination. Not only did it boast a low-key seaside location, but it was also, intriguingly, named after a pirate. Lord Willow, as the English buccaneer was apparently known, had used its harbour as a base for swarming the rigging, brandishing cutlasses and other scurvy deeds.

Greeted by a suitably piratical parrot at the guesthouse reception, I felt that luck - or perhaps even the plundering peer - was on my side. As the sun rose and began to dispel the chill sea air I set off, curious as to what Los Vilos and my still limited grasp of Spanish could conspire to produce.

A line of snaggle-toothed islands lay off the impressive limestone bluffs to the south of the village, and I wandered along the deserted cliff tops until I’d worked up sufficient sweat to brave a dip in the cool clear waters of the Pacific below. Despite the soaring temperatures, the ocean was bracingly refreshing - the Humboldt Current sweeps Antarctic water all the way up to northern Peru.

As I meandered back my thoughts turned to breakfast. But before hitting the hostel I couldn’t resist a detour along a rickety wooden pier, where a group of fishermen were chewing the fat in a makeshift shelter, surrounded by a jumble of crab pots and a tangle of nets. The former were adorned with strands of seaweed, bits of starfish and numerous limbs of their erstwhile inmates. The men’s grizzled appearance, particularly their briny beards - remarkable additions in a country not known for its hirsuteness - would have done Lord Willow himself proud.

Despite being both a landlubber and a gringo - and therefore, I feared, an anathema to these Latin sea dogs - I couldn’t resist an attempt to converse. For, although I could barely count to ten in their language, thanks to many trips to Santiago’s seafood market, I knew a handful of words which I hoped might resonate with catchers of fish.

It was not until they’d established I wasn’t an estadounidense (that excellent adjective that describes citizens of the United States), that they decided I was worthy to join them on a barnacled plank. A bag of fist-sized clams, a lemon and a rusty knife were passed to me. After watching my mentors deftly shucking the live molluscs, I began to follow suit.

As I worked my way through the clams I was treated to tales of how ‘giant squid’ were decimating the local hake population; a discussion of the relative merits of the SPL and the Chilean league; and numerous toasts to respective national heroes - Bernardo O’Higgins and ‘Hiulliam Wall-ass’. It seemed that they empathised with the struggles of the latter, having seen Braveheart a few years before.

The warm wine, hot sun, and increasingly pungent reek released by sea creatures exposed to strong sunlight finally began to take their toll. And after much shaking of shellfish-soaked hands I bade the gnarled fishermen farewell.  As I headed off for a siesta I realised, with some pride, that I had survived my first ever morning in company without speaking English and had done so in the company of latter-day pirates to boot.

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