Enormous sardine bait balls, a sea lion colony at Punta Pichalo that will swim circles round you, and the Ross Shire, a…Enormous sardine bait balls, a sea lion colony at Punta Pichalo that will swim circles round you, and the Ross Shire, a Scottish-built sailing ship that went down here more than a century ago and is dived only by experienced people. Pisagua shipped the saltpetre that made northern Chile rich and then was abandoned when synthetic nitrate killed the trade. It was later used as a political prison camp. The Victorian opera house still stands in a town of a few hundred people, at the foot of the driest desert on earth. Anchorage: Pisagua bay, a near-abandoned nitrate port under a thousand-metre desert cliff. Hazards: Depth on the wreck, swell on an open coast, and a village with almost no services. Mehr