Author: Pete

Location:  00º 50.007S   89º 51.142W

Date: 17:00 March 16 to 17:00 March 17

Day 8 on the sea.

Greetings from the Galapagos!

Tayrona made it to the land of giant tortoises, marine iguanas, and blue footed boobies! We, however, haven’t gotten to land yet!  Right now we’re cruising between islands, an odd sensation to have land so close, and all around!

This morning in the haze we spotted our first Galapagosean island, San Cristobal.  I made up ‘Galapagosean’.  Sounds legit to me though.  Felix gave the obligatory ‘Land Ho!’ and we all clamored up to the deck to see our success.

Then the tides got funky.  Had we been trying to sail in the light wind we would’ve certainly been driven back into the sea.  Since we had the iron gennies at 1500 RPM, we powered our way un-ecologically through into the inter-island waters.

We watched San Cristobal move towards us at glacial pace.  Really.  The kind of slow where you’d have time to write a doctoral thesis, learn Swahili, and then clean the bathroom, and you still wouldn’t be there. Our maddeningly sluggish progress was on account of contrary tide and wind, and also not being accustomed to coastal sailing.  Out on the sea you have nothing to judge your motion, so it doesn’t matter.  Good thing we had lots to do.

We’ve generally seen bright, sunny days on this passage, so the cooler cloud cover was kind of a nice novelty.  The boat had been accumulating quite a good deal of crud, so when the clouds opened and the rains came down, we took the opportunity to clean the boat’s topsides and our own.

We should be at our anchorage by tomorrow morning to do the clear in procedures. All good aboard Tayrona on our last (hopefully) night at sea!