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.