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Woke up this morning and the Galapagos Islands were out of sight. Winds still not great, but a little in our favor, but we brought out the Code Zero and made some way towards our target if not a bit too north for our liking. No fish… the fancy lures have now been fired and replaced with good old, tried and tested rubber squiddies and the evil tri-hooks, we’ll see what happens tomorrow with this setup. I woke for my 5am shift to learn we had cleared the confused seas and winds to the south of Isabella and were now smoothly sailing albeit in light winds from the SSE. As the day progressed this presented us with a dilemma. We really wanted to make some miles south to reach the stronger and more easterly trades. To get south we had to keep our standard sails up which don’t have a great deal of power in the lighter winds. Later in the day I decided to try the Code Zero. Even though we point over 20 degrees less it does have a lot more sail area. The result was we ended up sailing due west. With the NW setting current (also preventing us making any distance south) we were making approx 6 knots in 10 knots of wind. So the dilemma was do we press SW at around 4 knots reaching the trades sooner or W at 6.5 hoping for a change in wind which we reasonably could expect to happen at some time. In the end, I figured both would make sense. Fly the Code Zero during the day to make up the miles in the light winds and fly the regular head sail at night for safety and making our way south. As luck would have it, the wind strengthened a little around dusk so when we switched sails we were able to sail SW at 6 knots. By 11pm, at the end of my last watch of the day, the winds had shifted to the SE suggesting we may be reaching the trades already. So that’s the wind. The rest of the day. Dawn revealed 360 sea/ocean. Land was lost from sight. The wonderful picture of Isabella the previous dusk was now lost over the horizon and/or in the haze of distance. I set the four trolling lines as soon as I could but we were to have no luck. Around 9am we made contact with a Japanese sail boat, Yaima. All was well aboard. Sea life was much less abundant. We saw the odd dolphin in the distance leaping out of the water, presumably chasing prey. One or two sea birds were seen including one which flew alongside the boat after dark. For a while it was entertaining trying to hold the laser pointer on it. The night sky is truly awesome. The moon is new, there is no light pollution at all and the humidity is reasonably low. We therefore see the sky in all it’s glory. The milky way is no longer a smudge and is now a textured band across the sky. The only other surprise for me happened during what is really day 3. During Helen’s shift I’d opened the hatch above our bed a crack to get some fresh air. I awoke to the sound of Helen in the cabin and something cold and wet on my leg. I asked Helen if she had put cold wet hands on my leg and she said no so I replied there must be a fish in the bed. She said I must have woken up in a dream so I rummaged through the sheet. At first I couldn’t find anything convincing Helen of her hypothesis. In the end I found a reasonably large flying fish nestled in the sheet, still a alive. Yuch. I threw it back out the hatch. I had to shower while Helen switched the sheets. Nasty surprise. All the thrills of being out at sea are tempered by the news that my father has had to have a series of operations with worrying discoveries. I check for emails from family fairly frequently. When I see a new email header and have to wait the extra minute for the text of the email to arrive I await in in a combination of hope and dread wondering if the news will be encouraging or not. The separation caused by distance and isolation isn’t the best thing right now. Love you Dad. Hope you get better soon. Woke up quite early, Steve and me went to the island with all the sea lions, iguanas and penguins to take some pictures. Once back on the boat we dismantled the dinghy and stashed all the various parts away, before setting out. As much as I’ve enjoyed the Galapagos and all its strange beautiful landscapes and animals, I feel its definitely time to leave. During my afternoon shift I saw 2 whales about 50 feet away from the boat, some dolphins and a couple of jumping manta rays. No fish on our lines, but we have seen lots of fish related activity. I’m sure we’re going too slow for our lures to be working properly. Wind not exactly in the best direction, but roughly in the right way for us to make some progress. Hopefully once we clear the island it will be more consistent. Its going to take a couple of days to get back into the shift routine, even tho it’s changed slightly. That’s it for day 1, unless we catch some fish I think my blog entries are going to be rather short. We left Isla Isabela about eight this morning after John and Steve returned from taking final photos of the local terrain and wild life just off our anchorage. I said farewell to the sea lions, penguins, manta rays and turtles I saw as we sail out of the bay. Isabela was a great island to visit before leaving the Galapagos completely. It was wonderful to see so many wild life in their natural surroundings. The volcanic landscape and terrain was exactly how I had expected the Galapagos to really look like. We had a wonderful time on Santa Cruz but I did feel that that island was bit touristy and commercialized. It was good to experience the natural, real and little changed Galapagos. It took us a while to get away from the island as the wind and waves were very variable and we struggled to sail. However we were rewarded by seeing a few humped back whales just off the coast as we moved along it. Two whales came near our boat so we were able to see them quite clearly. For quite some time we saw three water spouts traveling along the side of us. We also saw a huge pod of the dolphins, more whale spouts, numerous sea birds all chasing what appeared to be large shoals of fish. There seemed to be a lot of frenzied action going on. We also had our fishing lines out. Did we catch any? No! We finally had to motor to get away from the affects the island had on the wind and waves. Once we got a few mile away, the waves calm down and wind became more consistent. Consistent with our experience of the pacific we consistently had no wind! During my night shift I let the boat drift with the current and made about 2 knots per hour. Only 2998 nautical miles left to go!! A special message to my father in law. First a note on clocks. As with convention we’re keeping our ship clocks set to the time of the port of departure for the duration of this passage. This keeps our body clocks to a constant rhythm as our watches will be constant to the ship board clock throughout our passage. However, we will be traversing nearly 50 degrees of longitude which means we’ll our subjective time in terms of sunrise, meals, sunset, etc. will become later in the day with respect to our ship board clocks. Our blogs will be written from midnight to midnight based on the shipboard clock which is in fact 6 hours behind GMT/UTZ/Zulu. Helen became adamant we should start our blogs on day 1 rather than day 0 as last time and dug her heals in over the issue. So, at the beginning of day 1, John and I went back ashore to the nearby island to see the sea lions, crabs and iguana. The same beach was occupied by the sea lions but we saw a few more scattered around the island too. The iguana and crabs were also out in abundance. As soon as we were back on the boat we lifted off the outboard, removed the chain and fuel tank and lifted it all aboard and secured the dinghy for passage. After our final pre-passage boat checks we were off by 8:30. We waved goodbye to David on Leu Cat as we left then threaded our way through the tightly packed anchorage. Leaving the anchorage, to our dismay, we found the wind out of the SW right on our desired course. We motor sailed for about 30 minutes to give us a reasonable line out of the bay. The wind was not going to be our friend this day. On a port tack (wind off our port side) we ended up sailing slightly north of west, not enough to avoid getting too close to the coast. When we tacked and put the wind off our starboard we were nose into the current and with the wind doing 8 knots or less we would make about 2 knots at best. We worked our way down the coast in this fashion making slow progress of it. By the evening the wind began to die down to under 4 knots and to avoid being swept round the western corner and further to the north by the current we pointed south and gave ourselves a slight push with the electric motors. During my 8pm to 11pm watch I fired up the genset to recharge the batteries and to give us and additional push as the swell was confused and the boat was bucking around uncomfortably. 2/3 of the way through the recharge the genset stopped with an overheating error. Initial checks (water, coolant, fan) seemed ok so it looked like a daylight investigation. By now we were out of the uncomfortable swell and we could make 3.5 knots in the now 8 knot wind. That was the grumpy side of day 1. However the passage on day 1 also had it’s ups. During John’s midday watch he called out having spotted a whale nearby. We rushed out to see a hump back whale moving away from us and not too far away. Further away to our stern we saw another whale but it was too far to identify. Throughout the rest of the day we caught glimpses of other whales as well as plenty of puffs of water from their spouts. We also saw plenty of huge manta rays with their dark tops and white undersides. I saw one leap right out of the water. At one point we passed through an area where there were clearly lots of fish. We could see small dolphin leaping in the distance and many sea birds feeding. We again saw signs of whales in the area. We tacked to head through the area with our four lines out but caught nothing. We also had a few sea lion sightings. Given the speed we were doing at times it could have been the same one. Sunset was glorious. The clouds had dispersed in time for us to see the peak of the volcano on the SW tip of Isabella. The sun dipped over the horizon in a clear patch of sky. Shortly after winking out we were raised atop a swell and for a brief moment the sun reappeared and winked out again. |
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