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.
