sea weed and fire wood

We've had a mystery since we got here. early on we would see people out in the bay at low tide collecting things and putting it into sacks. Often the full sacks would be tied together and left to be submerged when the tide came in. At first we thought they were clamming. Perhaps the bagged shellfish were cleaned by the water after burrowing in the sand. The shellfish theory was sunk when we saw folks heft a full sack over their should and walk it in to shore. When full of potatoes the sacks weigh over 100 pounds. Full of clams or mussels no one would be hoisting the sack on his shoulder. A few weeks ago at low tide, the shoreline collectors had a pick up truck down on the beach. Sacks were piled in the back of the pick up and ferried up to the roadside and a parked flatbed truck. What could be in the sacks that folks would risk trashing a pick up truck with salt and sand? A curious gringa went to investigate. Seaweed! seaweed? all the work and fuss was over collecting sacks of seaweed?
Now I was really confused and even more curious. Chilotes include seaweed in stews. However the sea vegetables I'd seen in the market were dried blocks of the leafy spinach like seaweed or wound up strands of dried kelp. This seaweed was stringy, black witch's hair. At most I could imagine using it as bedding in a garden to keep weeds out. The men loading the sacks on the flatbed truck must have been from the continent because they had no time to answer my questions, much less to try to figure out what I, in my academic Spanish, was asking.
Since then we have seen seaweed spread out to dry on the side of the road. In a rural area an ox cart was heaped full of seaweed coming up from the beach. Finally when I returned to school I found a book on aquaculture in Chile. Armed with answers, here is the in depth water plant report.
There are 8 distinct varietals of seaweed that get harvested by Chilotes and used here and around the world. Chilotoes eat the long strand seaweed we call kelp and the leaf weed that looks like bright green lettuce in the water. Two types of sea weed are harvested and sent to Japan as food. One type of stringy seaweed is used in plastics, another is dried and used as a filling for organic diapers. But my favorite destination for Chilote seaweed is make up. The secret ingredient in all that natural, protein rich, moisturizing cream that we've been paying big bucks for, is seaweed.

THe first cold nights of late fall / winter are a good time to clear up another question we've been asking. Just how much wood does a family in Chiloe use in a heating season? Mind you the nights get down to freezing but not below, but a rainy day in mid summer can be 50F and damp.

One day in February, the least rainy season, Monica's brother Piti backed a truck into the backyard with a load of wood. Piti, Luis, Luis' sons Pipe and Diego and Tia Victoria (is there anything she can't do?!?) all were atop the truck unloading the wood. While Piti went back for a second truckload, Gabi posed in front as a scale bar. She is standing in front of half a years' worth of wood. Luis told me that to heat their 1500 square foot house, they will burn 25 cubic meters (~30 cubic yards) of wood. The cost for one year of wood stove heating? 500,000 pesos or between $1,000 -$1,100 USD. That's a lot of wood and a lot of money. Multiply all that wood across a city of 35,000 and you can understand why we have a wood smoke haze on cold mornings.
Another perspective, In the 2010-2011 heating season, our house in Cambridge (about 1,900 SqFt with blown in insulation in the walls and roof) cost the same amount to insulate.