LAND YEAH

San Cristobal Galapagos

We had the anchor down by 11am.  Then we had to wait until our agent Bolivar came out with the Port Captain, sanitation, the navy and another official.  They put our plants into quarantine, which is good, as the other option was to have them confiscated.  There was a good deal of discussion as to what Shadow Benny, or razor cilantro is called in Spanish.

After the inspection of the boat we had the rest of the night off!  Time for a good night’s sleep.  Bolivar is supposed to be by the boat at 10am.  Ooops, we forgot about the time change.  Regardless he did not arrive until the early afternoon.  Then we could go ashore.  So we did.  We walked a good bit of the town and then over to the visitor centre.  It was informative.  Town itself is cute.  They have benches everywhere, which are most often occupied by sea lions!  The rules of the park (all of Galapagos is park) is to not go closer than 6 feet to an animal, hard to avoid with the sea lions sleeping on the ramp from the water taxi!

We took water taxi’s in, as if you take your dinghy, you are just providing a new home for a sea lion!

A sea lion made it up onto the boat, this would have been a jump of 5 or so feet!  Cheryl chased him off before he could smell up the foredeck!

We walked to a beach called La Lobriera.  Past the beach you came to a cliff which we walked along quite a ways.  You see the track of the marine Iguana as they go by day to the rocks, spending the nights in the vegetation near the shore.  At the cliff we saw nesting Blue footed Boobies (unique to the Galapagos), Tropicbirds and a night gull, not to mention the views of the shoreline.  Awesome!

 

We did a 2 tank dive at Kicking rock.  It was much more than a two tank dive.  We had to be checked out, so we did that, then went for a snorkel.  Karen got pictures of a marine iguanas in the water!  Then the dive!  Hammerheads, a great variety of new fish, or old shaped fish with new colours.  And finally a frog fish, something we have been searching for for 4 years!   Visibility wasn’t great and but the surge was!  Look out here comes the wall, again!

We took a local taxi and had a marvelous island tour.  We started visiting the oldest residence, the Tortoises.  We hiked to the volcano, which holds a fresh water lake, circumnavigated it.  And finished with the Cieba tree treehouse!  An awesome day with wrinkled residence and spectacular views!

The usual, went shopping, wandering, had dinner with 5 other boats in town, waited a day for our Zarpe and then moved onto Santa Cruz.

HEART RACING START

Cheryl waiting for a fish

Yup we are on our way, anticipation is over, the heart rates is rising as we pulled up anchor before 8 am and were on our way to the Galapagos, our longest passage yet, with 4 other boats.  All is well for hour one, Karen is down below checking in with the Panama net while Cheryl is at the helm; all of a sudden Cheryl hears a zing!   It is our new fishing rod telling us we have a fish.  Karen yells up and asks for the latitude and longitude and Cheryl yells back we have a fish.  Now how to use this new rod and reel, it was easy in the store but now we have a fish on, our 2 minute fishing lesson from others came into play….let the fish play itself out.  Sure but how do I stop this Damn thing from taking all my line.  Karen comes up to help or at least give some encouragement…not sure for who, the fish or Cheryl.  So who will get tired first Cheryl or the fish?  Karen has the Gaff in hand.  Fish looks tired and Cheryl starts to reel it in, nope it not tired yet, Yup it’s tired, nope, yup okay who is tired Cheryl or the fish.  I can hear my fishing coaches in my ear saying “let it play itself out”.  Well finally it looks like Cheryl is winning…Karen has the seaweed wrap on standby for sushi and our menu plans have changed to fresh fish for dinner…so all we have to do is land this sucker…It jumps, it dives, it jumps and dives this fish is an endurance fighter for sure.  15 feet from the foot the boat.  Wasbi is now out of the cupboard, Gaff posed…it jumps it does a full twist with a half pike and smiles as it spits out the hook.  Fish one…Cheryl zero but her heart rate is up, who needs a fitness class?

We are travelling along a huge pod of dolphins come to say hi, with winds picking up and seas with it we are zizzing along.  It is a bit rough as the seas are coming from 2 different directs so not so comfortable.  Around 9 pm Cheryl is down sleeping or trying and Karen is at the helm when we hear a big bang actually a couple of them Cheryl leaps out of bed, to see what happen, we search for what hit us or what we hit but we can’t see anything as the seas are high and of course it is dark, we check to make sure we don’t have any leaks, all is well.   We try and get our heart rates back down again.  We had seen a lot of tree branches and tress floating so figure that must have been it. Now the fun begins, to try and sleep while holding on as the seas are still all over the place and the wind has increased as expected.  Day one done, 6 to 7 more days to go. 

We had two days of 20-30 knot winds, from behind, which was the forecast.  Add the current and we had a good number of miles under our belts.  Then a calm day, the seas subside and it is easy to sleep, even it if means that we have to run the engine.

Liward get a new forecast from Chris Parker, we should have wind for the next 2 days, 7-10 knots.  OK, we can move with that with the Gennicker up.  By now we are 70 or so miles behind the larger boats.  They get the 7-10 knots, we get 20knots, a few hours were we were probably closer to 25.  So the seas are back up and sleeping is again difficult.

What is it we actually did, we modified Jimmy Cornell’s route for the expected wind, we went further west than Jimmy recommends and it turned out well for us.  But that was with constant weather input.

Karen starts to calculate the possible arrival times; we do not want to arrive in the dark.  At 6 knots we get in at 3, at 5.5 we get in at … Well I didn’t figure on us averaging over 8 knots for 6 straight hours, so we had the anchor down at 11am!  6 days and 3 hours.  LAND HO

Our top speed was 10.4 knots!  We averaged 6 knots.  Saw a lot of dolphins, caught no fish!  As to sailing we had a bit of everything, head sail only, Gennicker only, engine only and motor sailing.   881 miles under our belt, only 3,000 left to go to the Marquesas! Fastest speed 10.4 knots.

We had to get the boat ready to enter the Galapagos, so Karen made pesto, Cheryl made Mojito mix, expecting that they would confiscate the herbs and citrus.  They put the herbs in quarantine (in the V-birth bathroom), so maybe we didn’t need to worry so much. 

We crossed the equator in the daylight.  We toasted Interlude and Neptune and dined on Smoked Salmon and smoked mussels with our Champagne!  In fact we are looking at planning more equator crossings!  We didn’t go for a swim as we were just moving too fast.

Knowing we were going to have a good deal of wind the first few days we planned the dinners, we had seafood pie (prepared ahead of time).  We had scalloped potatoes and ham, chicken stirfry, and beef stroganoff.  While Karen had made bagels ahead of time, we had enough fruit for fruit salad of breakfast each day.  We had wraps, and left overs for lunch.  (Meals are important underway, as they pass the time!) Now we are off to explore the island after lots of sleep.

Las Perlas, Panama

The highlights of the Las Perlas was catching up to some of our friends that we met in the San Blas and Bocas plus catching our first fish trolling in our dingy.  Our excuse for not catch many fish is that the water was so cold because of the Humboldt Current, which comes up  each year for 2-4 weeks, straight from Antarctica burrrrrr.  We also had the red tide, that apparently often follows the Humboldt Current so just imagine a blood red sea and that is what you see in the water. Not so good for swimming or fishing. So we only went swimming 3 times.  We did get to go clam hunting with Kaija from Kaija’s Song who taught us which clams to eat and where to find them. Boy do you need a lot of clams to make a meal.  Now that is our type of hunting and fishing, clams move very slow okay they don’t move at all.  It was fun wading in the tide looking for the little fellows and getting off the boat but we all decided that that is one creature we will leave alone and will now truly appreciate canned clams.  So now what do we hunt?

Interlude

We arrived at this little island called Pedro Gonzales where we visited the little town which their main event on a Saturday night is cock fighting, not our cup of tea so we move around the island to this anchorage with a beautiful sandy beach with palms.

This end of the island is being developed for condos and hotels, but they still let us wander around.  So off we go into the jungle, not really, as they have made roads for their heavy equipment but they have left lime, mango and papaya trees still standing, all in easy access for our foraging.  Then one night one of the boats beside us had their dingy engine stole right off their davits, yup it was locked but they still got it.  So our beautiful little anchorage was spoiled. That night all of the boats set up alarm systems or spot lights just in case they came back for more.  But all was well and the next day we decided to have a BBQ on the beach and forget about what had happen and continued to enjoy our island paradise all arranged by our new friends on Liward. 

Fish for dinner

After doing our final wifi and foraging and restocking courtesy of Minnie B and Limbo who brought out some more fruit and veggies from Panama City, we left Pedro Gonzales.  Off to San Jose singing “Do you know the way to San Jose?”

We heard about this private resort that has a restaurant and they let the riff raft like us come ashore to use their facilities so we thought what a great place to have a last night dinner in Panama and boy was it beautiful: between the parrots, macaws and the toucan there to greet you and great food and an awesome view, all four boats went away full and happy. The island is privately owned by the family who owns Air Panama and one of the largest hardware store chains in Central America. But you would never know it was private they treated us very well or maybe because we all dug out our best boat clothes. 

Can I take your order

On the wetside we still have to get used to the tides, as we were heading into make reservations for the dinner we misread the swell going into shore with our dingy and got swamped, in fact there was more water and sand in our dingy than in the sea.  Well, lesson learned.  We are still getting rid of the sand in Trouble.

That night the swell came in which made for a very uncomfortable nights sleeping, that is, if you could sleep.  It certainly gave a new meaning to tossing and turning. So at 7 am we pulled anchor along with Limbo and off we went in search of some more diesel.  Next island is supposed to have the largest village so they must have diesel right??  Sort of.  As we are just going around the corner our autohelm acted up, so on the phone to our reps.  It is a mystery again.  We turn it on and off ‘it works” then on and it doesn’t must be a loose wire or gremlins,  okay we will deal with that later.  We anchor off the town Karen and Rita off of Limbo go off to find diesel while Don and Cheryl go back to the big boats and empty some of the jerry cans into the big boats tanks.  We get the call from the girls, they found diesel.  It was quite a search, you can see some big fishing boats and power plant on the island so they must have diesel right???.  Karen and Rita asked the fishermen, the people at the tiendas and finally found a gentleman who was happy to sell us Diesel.  So off Don and Cheryl go back to shore, Don and Cheryl decided it was best if one of them stays with the dingy as we don’t want to leave the dingy unattended plus the tide is coming in so off Don goes with 5 jerry cans to find the girls and only got stuck once in the mud on route.  Cheryl had some kids come to visit her on the dingy who wanted to go for a ride but she only allowed one kid on the dingy who helped her move the dingy as the tide was coming in.  Don found the girls and the diesel was purchased but we think they actually sold us the diesel that they store and use for the generator plant.  Well, mission accomplished and off we go to Spirito Santos for the night.  What a very peaceful night no rocking and rolling.  We said our “See ya” to Limbo as they are heading around South America and we pulled anchor and headed to the bottom of Isla Reye to get ready to leave the next morning for Galapagos. As we had read and heard the Las Perlas is defiantly a place to spend more time in, but it is time for Interlude to move plus a weather window is calling us and all of our friends that are in Galapagos are telling us to get our butts over there, so we said goodbye to Panama.  That night we called our buddy boats and found out the info for check-ins and the final  weather report then we cracked open a bottle of Champagne to welcome Interlude to the Pacific, to toast our next adventure and to share a glass (okay a drop or 2) to Neptune.  Tomorrow the big jump!!!!