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Bruce the englishman and a life at sea See map

As an adult now, with a deep and punished voice and the sea got in the skin, is now the "English" Bruce, the most seasoned sailor of San Blas Bay. The locals do not hesitate to point him out as one who knows more about the secrets of the sea in the area, as his knowledge and skill in navigating has made that the prefecture has demanded his collaboration several times when burned potatoes.

The sailor explains

"Everything is power walking. With the commercial fishing you learn a lot, you walk day and night and it's your time to browse. But when you carry people you can not go about doing experiments, you have to take them to where you put the bait and fish".

In so many years the waves agree that he have had to deal with complicated situations.

"Some were ugly, but we're still alive, and it's all part of the trade. The best way not to go through these situations is able to look over time."

"If a sailor comes to old it means it was very, very lucky, or because it was at least fairly well informed. Or a little of both. Nature gives you plenty of signs: changes in weather and wind, the gulls and tides. If you can read these signs, it is difficult to get something bad happens."

Trousdell Bruce lives in a house built slowly, lying on the shore of the creek El Jabalí and guarded by deep woods. There, with two boats and a dock he maintained himself for some years almost exclusively thanks to tourism, thoug commercial fishing "yet not leaves nothing."

The big man today, when a boy had taken a liking to the boats. As a boy he worked in the city of Viedma with Don Antonio Pelle, and he learned much of what he knows about the boats and other he studied from old books about shipbuilding.

Born in Buenos Aires. His father was an American who came to these shores to the persecution of McCarthyism and ended up marrying in the capital with an English girl. Bruce spent his childhood on the farm of Yaverán, located halfway between Viedma and resort El Cóndor. In rough times, when he was seventeen he left home and ended up in San Blas to work in a field. After completing military service, English Trousdell bought in Rawson the boat 'Tammer', that he fixed in one farm of Carmen de Patagones. Without money, with the help of local carpenters and a diesel engine Ford rather old started for the paradise of the fishermen in search of work. And there he stayed. He ever returned to Patagones, but always pulled more San Blas.

In the early eighties a fishing company in Mar del Plata offered to devote himself to commercial fishing, experience that went very well for five years, catching cod, shark, dogfish and gatuzos.

With a soft and reminiscent anger he remembered the cargo trucks that came from his stronghold and bitterly points out that from those times there is only the cold, which now only serves as a repository of some junk.

There also operated a salt lick where they made three to five kilos of dried cod. Now without exports, the domestic market would absorb only a few hundred kilos, which does not justify even the implementation of fishing.

Tourist activity generally runs from October until just after Easter and during the interim while awaiting the return of tourists, Bruce is engaged in the transportation of goods and livestock to the island Gama and to carpentry work.

By Ignacio Artola