LAST DAYS IN THE GALAPAGOS
Baqueriso Moreno, Isla San Cristobal, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, May 10, 2006
After three weeks in The Galapagos “End Times” are here. All the signs are around us! Volcanoes! Strange animals and birds! Lack of trade winds! Higher fuel prices! In the face of the coming Judgment we are preparing our arc to “sail” the final 600 Nm to our “winter home” at Bahia de Caráquez on the mainland of Ecuador.
We arrived here three weeks ago after 17 days of mostly motorsailing SE from Acapulco, Mexico, with our son, Andrew, 19, aboard as crew. In fact, I should say that having Andrew aboard with us was one of the high points of our trip to The Galapagos. Not only has he grown into such a fine young man but he is an excellent crewman as well: always ready to pitch in; always with a sense of humour; outwardly, at least, unfazed by the primitiveness of our vessel; and apparently unflappable under stress. (Once on the voyage, he and I had an ironic chuckle when, during a blow, we had to go forward onto the foredeck to take in the big, unwieldy drifter sail while Kathleen steered the boat up into the wind. The bow began to pitch violently. With its wire luff, the drifter never, ever comes down of its own weight, and you always have to get out onto the bowsprit and physically manhandle it down. I have done it lots of time and it is good at least for an adrenalin rush. There is basically nothing to hang onto out there except the sail and the jib stay, and you need at least three arms while that damned sail seems always to want to throw you off into the waves. This time I told Andrew to go out and pull it down. He hesitated, swallowed hard, and then turned to me, looked me full in the eye and said, “Dad, I love you,” and scrambled forward. We both laughed.) We had lots of time to talk about important things in our lives, sometimes while we were sitting out in the cockpit at night under the stars. A great guy and a first class sailor!
We spent a week together before he left at Isla Isabela, the largest and the youngest of these volcanic islands (only a million years old and with five volcanoes still on the go) and were able to visit a volcanic crater by horse and hiking. Andrew also went on a snorkelling tour by panga where he could swim with turtles and sharks before we left to motorsail overnight to Santa Cruz Island where he could catch his connecting flight to the mainland last Sunday. He will be staying overnight in Guayaquil with Ruben Kremers, a 17-year-old acquaintance that we knew from Frankfurt many years ago.
On Santa Cruz, we met Al, Lydia and Kelsey off S/V Morova, Vancouver, and spent a boozy night with them ashore. We did also visit the Darwin Research Station and looked at more tortoises.
To be frank, we are all now somewhatburnt out on tortoises. However you think about evolution and nature, it does make you think about this sort of eco-tourism. It is difficult to make a tourist attraction of something like evolution, after all, though they have done it fairly well. At the core, however, there is nearly nothing about nature here that is any more interesting than, say Yellowstone National Park, Glacier Bay National Park or Kenya’s wildlife parks. In fact, I should say that other areas of nature protection might be even more interesting: after all lions, bisons, grizzlies and bald eagles are even more exciting than giant tortoises. But the former are hard to see and the latter, so slow and vulnerable that you can approach them closely, are hard to avoid. But how interesting are they really after you have gazed upon them once for ten minutes? After you have identified the various kinds of giant tortoises and you understand the evolutionary aspects of these beasts, that’s it. And how many blue-footed boobies can you see and retain or feign amazement? Any booby, after all, is a miracle and therefore in theory interesting. And so are robins and crows. Then you add to this that the cost of looking at this fauna is over the top in The Galapagos (e.g. $100 park fees, harbour-master and/or agent fees that can only be called gouging, huge mark-ups on fuel and water.)
As you can see, it’s time for us to move on.
One bizarre side-t of being in these Darwininan islands – I mean, Darwin and evolution is in your face here - was to see a local Seventh Day Adventist Church letting out from services in Puerto Ayora last Saturday. The Adventists are, I believe, very fundamental Christians, and are part of the strong swing in Latin America away from the Roman Catholic Church and towards evangelical sects, by which I also include the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, etc. Since this Adventist church was within a stone’s throw of the Darwin Research Centre, I was dying to ask the parishioners how they reconciled all this. But I let my interest evolve into just wondering.
On Monday morning early I say goodbye to Andrew on the street of Puerto Ayora as he jumps into a camioneta (pickup-truck taxi) to head out to the airport. I get back onto a panga taxi and return to Vilisar and Kathleen. Vilisar is already ready for sailing with all the sail covers off and things stowed below. We have telephoned ahead to the electrician in Baquerizo Moreno, 40 miles away, that we were returning to have him rectify the power-generating problem that he had worked on a week earlier. This time we are travelling in daylight since we hope the solar panels will provide enough juice to keep the batteries strong enough to operate the electric fuel pump on the engine. The winds are fluky and, as usual, right on the nose. We are heartily sick of motoring now and want to be sailing. Everyone, locals and bluewater cruisers, tells us that the trade winds should be along any day now. Their word in God’s ear, as the Muslims say.
We arrive late afternoon on Isla San Cristobal with the batteries absolutely flat but the reliable old Lister still going strong. The winds pick up in the afternoon and, with the aid of the engine, we are able to point well to windward and get in without any problems. Sailing is a series of challenges. Our challenge on this day, as it turns out, is anchoring. We motor in amongst the dozen, mainly Scandinavian boats, at anchor and try to anchor in the same place as before. The bottom of the harbour has rocky portions and our Bruce anchor scrapes along and refuses to find any sand to set in. Finally, I decide we have to find a new spot and try to recover the anchor. It has become so heavy that I can barely pull it up (Andrew, where are you now that we need you?) and I suspect, correctly, that the anchor is bringing a large boulder up with it. We are not completely new to this problem. But this is a diamond shaped boulder weighing I should guess about fifty pounds. I finally get it up out of the water but cannot shake the rock out of the anchor. With the help of a Finnish sailor who rows over in his dinghy, I get a light rope under the rock, tense it up and tie it firmly to a cleat. Then I let the anchor out suddenly. The rock tumbles out of the hook and falls back into the water, narrowly missing the man’s rubber dinghy. All in a day’s work.
Originally, Andrew was going to crew with us to the mainland. But since it would have left so little time for him and us to see The Galapagos Archipelago, we arranged for him to get a domestic flight from Baltra Island to Guayaquil to connect to his Miami-New Orleans flight. So, for the first time, Kathleen and I will soon be attempting a long bluewater passage on our own.
Miguel and his sidekick Toni show up at the boat on Tuesday morning and Miguel goes right to work. He clearly knows what he is doing. He pulls off the Balmar 75-amp marine alternator and takes it apart on the bridge. I like the way he works because he shows you where the problem is rather than just telling you. The upshot is that the rotor is partially burned out and has to be replaced. He reckons he can have the part flown in from Guayaquil within 24 hours and installed by Thursday night (i.e. tomorrow). We do have a replacement alternator and we discuss using this and fixing the Balmar on the mainland. But, as he points out, the backup is just a car alternator and will not last very long in a marine environment and is anyway somewhat corroded. Moreover, it will require modifying the mounts. While he is about it, Miguel will make a new stainless steel mount for the Balmar; the old plastic one has cracked and is perhaps part of the problem since it produces a lot of vibration. We agree on an all-in price of $250, but will have to wait until one of my translating cheques hits the account in the U.S.A. before we can pay him the whole amount. That can’t happen before probably Tuesday at the earliest. So we are stuck here for a bit longer.
The bad news is the cost of repairs. Our boat is sound but the various systems aboard (sails, mechanical, electrical) but the good news is that the trade winds are now setting in. We have a steady SE breeze day and night now. This not only makes the weather here delightful with daytime temperatures of around 25ºC (77ºF) and cooling winds, but this is what we have been waiting for. It looks like we shall be able to sail to Bahia de Caráquez even if, at the beginning, we shall have to sail close-hauled on a starboard tack. As we get farther along the winds should turn more southerly as they follow the South-American coast. We hope we can do the voyage in about ten days or less.
A yellow panga-taxi pulls up with Bolivar Pesantes, the agent. He has the cruising permit at last. We can stay in the islands for 45 days more, bless him. Many boats gave up waiting and got 20-day cruising permits just from the port captain as part of Ecuador’s efforts to increase tourism to the archipelago. Senor Pesantes is scouting the anchorage to find boats to deliver papers to. But they are gone, on the way to The Marquesas already. The new policies might just put him out of business. We go by his office this morning to pay him the $60 fee (the cruising permit is actually free; the agent’s fee is $50 and upwards.) We decide to pay it rather than create an enemy in port. After all, we still want to spend the next 6-8 months in Ecuador. We will not worry about an exit Zarpe; we’ll just check into Bahia de Caráquez when we get there. It can be done without an agent, we are told.
We are relaxing now. Day trips ashore to visit the internet café and get some groceries. When we have money again we will provision. If we have enough we will buy some fuel (we cannot motor the whole way with what we have but we still have 400 miles worth, I estimate.) On the boat we read and snooze and play canasta at night by the light of our oil lamps (I cannot find mineral spirits to burn so we will soon be thrown back on the amber-coloured kerosene that we have been carrying in a ten-gallon jerry jug since British Columbia. Unfortunately, it gives off a somewhat smoky light. But it works.) Andrew writes that he caught his plane, arrived safely at Ruben’s house in Guayaquil and is having a great evening with him. By this evening he will be back in his own bed in the U.S.A. I shall go over the vessel once again and fix the one or two small items that I need to attend to before another voyage: the mast wedges slipped a little in the constant pitching to seaward coming here from Acapulco; the heavy-duty hand-operated bilge pump leaks a little at the T-junction just above the starting battery and needs to be sealed; the ties for the jib sail-cover have come apart and I shall attempt to stitch and glue them with thread and contact cement.) Kathleen is going to bake bread tomorrow for the trip. She is reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a terrific novel that I just finished, and I am reading a comic detective story featuring a globetrotting lesbian investigator. Despite the growling of sea lions all around us, the outside world reaches us.
Baqueriso Moreno, Isla San Cristobal, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, May 10, 2006
After three weeks in The Galapagos “End Times” are here. All the signs are around us! Volcanoes! Strange animals and birds! Lack of trade winds! Higher fuel prices! In the face of the coming Judgment we are preparing our arc to “sail” the final 600 Nm to our “winter home” at Bahia de Caráquez on the mainland of Ecuador.
We arrived here three weeks ago after 17 days of mostly motorsailing SE from Acapulco, Mexico, with our son, Andrew, 19, aboard as crew. In fact, I should say that having Andrew aboard with us was one of the high points of our trip to The Galapagos. Not only has he grown into such a fine young man but he is an excellent crewman as well: always ready to pitch in; always with a sense of humour; outwardly, at least, unfazed by the primitiveness of our vessel; and apparently unflappable under stress. (Once on the voyage, he and I had an ironic chuckle when, during a blow, we had to go forward onto the foredeck to take in the big, unwieldy drifter sail while Kathleen steered the boat up into the wind. The bow began to pitch violently. With its wire luff, the drifter never, ever comes down of its own weight, and you always have to get out onto the bowsprit and physically manhandle it down. I have done it lots of time and it is good at least for an adrenalin rush. There is basically nothing to hang onto out there except the sail and the jib stay, and you need at least three arms while that damned sail seems always to want to throw you off into the waves. This time I told Andrew to go out and pull it down. He hesitated, swallowed hard, and then turned to me, looked me full in the eye and said, “Dad, I love you,” and scrambled forward. We both laughed.) We had lots of time to talk about important things in our lives, sometimes while we were sitting out in the cockpit at night under the stars. A great guy and a first class sailor!
We spent a week together before he left at Isla Isabela, the largest and the youngest of these volcanic islands (only a million years old and with five volcanoes still on the go) and were able to visit a volcanic crater by horse and hiking. Andrew also went on a snorkelling tour by panga where he could swim with turtles and sharks before we left to motorsail overnight to Santa Cruz Island where he could catch his connecting flight to the mainland last Sunday. He will be staying overnight in Guayaquil with Ruben Kremers, a 17-year-old acquaintance that we knew from Frankfurt many years ago.
On Santa Cruz, we met Al, Lydia and Kelsey off S/V Morova, Vancouver, and spent a boozy night with them ashore. We did also visit the Darwin Research Station and looked at more tortoises.
To be frank, we are all now somewhatburnt out on tortoises. However you think about evolution and nature, it does make you think about this sort of eco-tourism. It is difficult to make a tourist attraction of something like evolution, after all, though they have done it fairly well. At the core, however, there is nearly nothing about nature here that is any more interesting than, say Yellowstone National Park, Glacier Bay National Park or Kenya’s wildlife parks. In fact, I should say that other areas of nature protection might be even more interesting: after all lions, bisons, grizzlies and bald eagles are even more exciting than giant tortoises. But the former are hard to see and the latter, so slow and vulnerable that you can approach them closely, are hard to avoid. But how interesting are they really after you have gazed upon them once for ten minutes? After you have identified the various kinds of giant tortoises and you understand the evolutionary aspects of these beasts, that’s it. And how many blue-footed boobies can you see and retain or feign amazement? Any booby, after all, is a miracle and therefore in theory interesting. And so are robins and crows. Then you add to this that the cost of looking at this fauna is over the top in The Galapagos (e.g. $100 park fees, harbour-master and/or agent fees that can only be called gouging, huge mark-ups on fuel and water.)
As you can see, it’s time for us to move on.
One bizarre side-t of being in these Darwininan islands – I mean, Darwin and evolution is in your face here - was to see a local Seventh Day Adventist Church letting out from services in Puerto Ayora last Saturday. The Adventists are, I believe, very fundamental Christians, and are part of the strong swing in Latin America away from the Roman Catholic Church and towards evangelical sects, by which I also include the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, etc. Since this Adventist church was within a stone’s throw of the Darwin Research Centre, I was dying to ask the parishioners how they reconciled all this. But I let my interest evolve into just wondering.
On Monday morning early I say goodbye to Andrew on the street of Puerto Ayora as he jumps into a camioneta (pickup-truck taxi) to head out to the airport. I get back onto a panga taxi and return to Vilisar and Kathleen. Vilisar is already ready for sailing with all the sail covers off and things stowed below. We have telephoned ahead to the electrician in Baquerizo Moreno, 40 miles away, that we were returning to have him rectify the power-generating problem that he had worked on a week earlier. This time we are travelling in daylight since we hope the solar panels will provide enough juice to keep the batteries strong enough to operate the electric fuel pump on the engine. The winds are fluky and, as usual, right on the nose. We are heartily sick of motoring now and want to be sailing. Everyone, locals and bluewater cruisers, tells us that the trade winds should be along any day now. Their word in God’s ear, as the Muslims say.
We arrive late afternoon on Isla San Cristobal with the batteries absolutely flat but the reliable old Lister still going strong. The winds pick up in the afternoon and, with the aid of the engine, we are able to point well to windward and get in without any problems. Sailing is a series of challenges. Our challenge on this day, as it turns out, is anchoring. We motor in amongst the dozen, mainly Scandinavian boats, at anchor and try to anchor in the same place as before. The bottom of the harbour has rocky portions and our Bruce anchor scrapes along and refuses to find any sand to set in. Finally, I decide we have to find a new spot and try to recover the anchor. It has become so heavy that I can barely pull it up (Andrew, where are you now that we need you?) and I suspect, correctly, that the anchor is bringing a large boulder up with it. We are not completely new to this problem. But this is a diamond shaped boulder weighing I should guess about fifty pounds. I finally get it up out of the water but cannot shake the rock out of the anchor. With the help of a Finnish sailor who rows over in his dinghy, I get a light rope under the rock, tense it up and tie it firmly to a cleat. Then I let the anchor out suddenly. The rock tumbles out of the hook and falls back into the water, narrowly missing the man’s rubber dinghy. All in a day’s work.
Originally, Andrew was going to crew with us to the mainland. But since it would have left so little time for him and us to see The Galapagos Archipelago, we arranged for him to get a domestic flight from Baltra Island to Guayaquil to connect to his Miami-New Orleans flight. So, for the first time, Kathleen and I will soon be attempting a long bluewater passage on our own.
Miguel and his sidekick Toni show up at the boat on Tuesday morning and Miguel goes right to work. He clearly knows what he is doing. He pulls off the Balmar 75-amp marine alternator and takes it apart on the bridge. I like the way he works because he shows you where the problem is rather than just telling you. The upshot is that the rotor is partially burned out and has to be replaced. He reckons he can have the part flown in from Guayaquil within 24 hours and installed by Thursday night (i.e. tomorrow). We do have a replacement alternator and we discuss using this and fixing the Balmar on the mainland. But, as he points out, the backup is just a car alternator and will not last very long in a marine environment and is anyway somewhat corroded. Moreover, it will require modifying the mounts. While he is about it, Miguel will make a new stainless steel mount for the Balmar; the old plastic one has cracked and is perhaps part of the problem since it produces a lot of vibration. We agree on an all-in price of $250, but will have to wait until one of my translating cheques hits the account in the U.S.A. before we can pay him the whole amount. That can’t happen before probably Tuesday at the earliest. So we are stuck here for a bit longer.
The bad news is the cost of repairs. Our boat is sound but the various systems aboard (sails, mechanical, electrical) but the good news is that the trade winds are now setting in. We have a steady SE breeze day and night now. This not only makes the weather here delightful with daytime temperatures of around 25ºC (77ºF) and cooling winds, but this is what we have been waiting for. It looks like we shall be able to sail to Bahia de Caráquez even if, at the beginning, we shall have to sail close-hauled on a starboard tack. As we get farther along the winds should turn more southerly as they follow the South-American coast. We hope we can do the voyage in about ten days or less.
A yellow panga-taxi pulls up with Bolivar Pesantes, the agent. He has the cruising permit at last. We can stay in the islands for 45 days more, bless him. Many boats gave up waiting and got 20-day cruising permits just from the port captain as part of Ecuador’s efforts to increase tourism to the archipelago. Senor Pesantes is scouting the anchorage to find boats to deliver papers to. But they are gone, on the way to The Marquesas already. The new policies might just put him out of business. We go by his office this morning to pay him the $60 fee (the cruising permit is actually free; the agent’s fee is $50 and upwards.) We decide to pay it rather than create an enemy in port. After all, we still want to spend the next 6-8 months in Ecuador. We will not worry about an exit Zarpe; we’ll just check into Bahia de Caráquez when we get there. It can be done without an agent, we are told.
We are relaxing now. Day trips ashore to visit the internet café and get some groceries. When we have money again we will provision. If we have enough we will buy some fuel (we cannot motor the whole way with what we have but we still have 400 miles worth, I estimate.) On the boat we read and snooze and play canasta at night by the light of our oil lamps (I cannot find mineral spirits to burn so we will soon be thrown back on the amber-coloured kerosene that we have been carrying in a ten-gallon jerry jug since British Columbia. Unfortunately, it gives off a somewhat smoky light. But it works.) Andrew writes that he caught his plane, arrived safely at Ruben’s house in Guayaquil and is having a great evening with him. By this evening he will be back in his own bed in the U.S.A. I shall go over the vessel once again and fix the one or two small items that I need to attend to before another voyage: the mast wedges slipped a little in the constant pitching to seaward coming here from Acapulco; the heavy-duty hand-operated bilge pump leaks a little at the T-junction just above the starting battery and needs to be sealed; the ties for the jib sail-cover have come apart and I shall attempt to stitch and glue them with thread and contact cement.) Kathleen is going to bake bread tomorrow for the trip. She is reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a terrific novel that I just finished, and I am reading a comic detective story featuring a globetrotting lesbian investigator. Despite the growling of sea lions all around us, the outside world reaches us.
posted by rjb @ Friday, May 12, 2006
1 Comments:
At Saturday, May 13, 2006 12:26:00 am,
Overboard said…
Lovely to read about your time on Tortoise Island. Made me chuckle lots. I'm still in Turkey, on the boat, and soon we will start doing longer passages. I'm learning something new every day and have never been happier.
:)
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