Date First Posted: April 13, 2006
Log Entry Start Date - March 17, 2006
Log Entry End Date - April 6, 2006
Location(s) Covered - Isla Isabela, Galapagos and enroute to the Marquesas
Present Location: Hiva Oa, Marquesas, French Polynesia
Latitude: 9 Deg. 48.2 S Longitude: 139 Deg. 01.9 W
Weather: Partly Cloudy, warm, frequent showers
Distance covered since last entry: 3017 nautical miles
Total distance traveled since departure from Antigua: 5489 nautical miles
Commentary:
We
had a short trip (40 miles) from Santa Cruz to Isabela Island. Isabela is
the largest and one of the youngest islands in the Galapagos, only about
700,000 years old versus 2-3 million years for some of the others. It is a
series of 5 large shield type volcanoes that rise from 10,000 foot ocean
depths to heights of 5-7,000 feet. These volcanoes are joined together at
their bases and form a “J” shape, with the town of Puerto Vilamil in the
lower right corner.
Although this was one of the first island colonized, it still has only about 2000 residents, and its history is largely centered around three prisons used in the mid-1900’s that were known for horrible abuses. A revolt in the 1950’s allowed the escape of many prisoners, of which only two were convicted of additional crimes, given the mitigating circumstances they suffered. After that, the prisons were closed, and all that remains is a wall constructed by the prisoners at one site that served no purpose other than to make hard work for them.
Besides
a little cattle farming, there isn’t much happening on Isabela other than a
small amount of tourism and scientific research for the national park. The
town itself is small and clean and has a beautiful beach. The harbor area
is about a mile down a road in a protected bay. We were surprised by how
pretty the town and island was, unspoiled by the thousands of tourists and
associated gift shops found on Santa Cruz.
The
main attractions on the islands are the volcanoes and wildlife. Although it
may be possible to visit the other volcanoes, the largest one (but not
highest), Sierra Negra is the one where most tourists go. On the way to
check in with the Port Captain, we stopped at one of the three little hotels
that had been mentioned to us (Casa de Marita), and arranged to take a tour
the next day. The tour was promoted as a truck ride, followed by a horse
ride, and then a hike to the crater.
We
started out being picked up at the hotel by our guide, Mathías Espinosa, and
joined by a German couple, their young daughter, and a German friend of
Mathías. We rode in a pickup truck for an hour to a corral most of the way
up the volcano. From there we rode on horseback for another hour until we
had reached the rim of the crater, a caldera about 6 miles in diameter and
an altitude of about 3500 feet. We were told this is the second
largest caldera in the world after Haleakela on Maui. The volcano’s shape was a classical cone,
very broad with shallow slopes. While the slopes were largely covered with
grass and shrubs, the floor of the caldera was entirely filled with black
and brown hardened lava, about 500 feet below the rim. Isabela and
Ferdinand, a neighboring island, are the two youngest islands in the
Galapagos and they still
have active volcanoes. Sierra Negra (the volcano we were climbing) had the
most recent eruption, last October.
As
we rode the horses part of the way around the rim, we could see steam
venting from spots in the caldera, and we were told that the blackest lava
was the most recent, which we saw in rivers flowing across the caldera from
a higher peak part way across from us. As lava ages, it turns browner as
the iron content in it oxidizes. We tied up our horses to bushes and
started to walk to the site of the most recent eruption. Most tour groups
are taken to some cinder cones on the outside of the crater where there is a
lot of lava and ash, but Mathías felt that the longer and more difficult
hike to the recent eruption was much more interesting.
After
nearly an hour of walking, we entered a zone that was like a black beach
covered with bits of lava. This lava was all from the October
eruption, and was up to 6 feet thick. Most of the lava was the size of
marbles, except very rough and irregularly shaped. It felt and sounded
a bit like walking through crunchy snow. On one side of us, the crater
sloped inward very sharply, so we had to be careful to stay away from the
edge. We kept going around the rim for what seemed like a long way,
climbing up ridges as we approached the site of the eruption. After a
final climb, we were only a few hundred yards from the center of the
eruption, and we could look down into the crater and see the most recent
lava flows. Nearby were crevasses with hot gases still being vented,
along with yellowish sulfur powder on some of the edges. It may take a
long time for all of the area to cool, and our shoes were getting warm from
the heat below the surface. Everywhere it looked like a moonscape, in
fact Jennifer said it looked like the Craters of the Moon National Monument that she had visited in Idaho last year.
Along
the trail, we had seen bones from cattle and wild horses that had died,
probably from thirst, in this area, but didn’t see any other wildlife except
a few birds. To our surprise, we saw a dog, probably wild, running ahead of
us up the barren lava, to the latest peak. We couldn’t figure out what it
was doing there, especially since its feet would be getting burnt from the
remaining heat under the ground.
After
taking in the view from near the peak, and seeing more smoke and steam still
rising from cracks only a few hundred yards away, we began our descent. It
was a long walk, and the horseback ride, while interesting, is not the most
comfortable mode of transportation. On the way down, we learned more about
our guide. He was born to a German father and Ecuadorian mother on the
mainland, and had been a national park guide for many years on Santa Cruz
before coming to Isabela. Having grown up in part in Germany, he was very
fluent in German and Spanish, plus had good English. Having a German family
on the tour made it more interesting for him, even though he said that
German tourists weren’t that rare.
With
his experience, similar to Steven Divine on Santa Cruz (whom we met and had
as a guide, and a friend of Mathías), his clientele has been very
interesting. For a few years, Mathías would be the lead guide on large
private yachts that came to visit the Galapagos. The park charges $200 per
person per day if you want to take your own boat on tours to the remote
islands, and only the very wealthy are willing to pay these fees. Just the
same, some do, and Mathías said he spent a month aboard Paul Allen’s
(Microsoft billionaire) yacht (which was perhaps the largest in the world at
the time), touring not only the Galapagos but also up to Costa Rica. He
also was the guide aboard Larry Elison’s (Oracle) yacht when it visited a
few years ago. More recently he was a guide for Richard DeVos (Amway), who
is a major donor to Jennifer’s Calvin College. He mentioned a few more
celebrities like Bo Derek, before we told him that no one would know us.
Just like some of the other guides we’ve met, Mathías was very well educated
and knowledgeable about the plants and animals in the Galapagos, as well as
the geology of the islands (his father was a geologist).
In
the harbor where we were anchored, the wildlife was just as memorable as the
land. We saw a number of the Galapagos penguins on a nearby rocky islet,
and one swam around our boat for an hour doing its thing, fishing and
bobbing along.
The
sea lions are everywhere, and similar to Wreck Bay in San Cristobal, they
make themselves at home on anchored fishing boats. They jump onto stern
platforms and over the rails into the cockpit areas and even on top of the
roof of some of the boats. They could care less as you go by in your
dinghy. We also saw marine iguanas, small rays, blue footed boobies,
frigate birds, and other exotic if not unique birds and animals just found
in the Galapagos. It is too bad on the one hand that more people don’t
visit Isabela (it had been restricted in the past), but may be better for
having it remain so unique as the last outpost of the Galapagos. We think
we enjoyed Isabela the best.
On
Monday, March 20, 2006, we pulled up our anchor and began our trip to the
Marquesas. From Isabela, the great circle distance is just less than 3000
miles, although we’ll likely go a longer distance as we tack or jibe with
the wind. This distance is more than we've sailed up until now from
Antigua. Until we get far enough south to reach the trade winds (we
think about 5 degrees south latitude), we will probably motor sail. Our
friends on Anthem are about 600 miles ahead of us, and they motored for the
first three days.
Even
though we know of perhaps a dozen boats already enroute to the Marquesas,
not counting the 30 or so Blue Water Rally boats that are also a few days
ahead of us, we don’t expect to see many boats enroute. The distance is too
great and boats tend to spread out based on their guesses on the best wind
angles. We did pass two boats the first day as we left the Galapagos. One
was pretty close, Tortilla Flat, a Gulfstar 50 we passed later in the day.
We may catch up to some of the slower Rally boats. In addition to the Rally
radio net which has check-ins each morning, we listen in on the Pan-Pacific
net, a new net just for boats between the Galapagos and Marquesas, and an
informal net with our friends on Anthem, another boat they met, called Great
Expectations, and hopefully Tortilla Flat.
We
have to adjust the times for these nets as we change time zones. When we
left Detroit we were on GMT – 5 hours (5 hours behind Greenwich Mean Time),
Antigua is GMT – 4 hours, Panama was back to GMT -5, and the Galapagos are
GMT -6 (the same as Chicago). Nominally, for every 1000 miles that you
travel around the equator, you gain or lose an hour. Therefore we’ll need
to set our clocks back about 3 times by the time we reach the Marquesas,
which uses GMT -9:30.
Right now, our sunrise and sunset are about 6:30 AM and PM. By traveling
west, these will become later, and when they are around 7:30, we’ll change
our clocks back. As our sunsets become later, we are gradually losing a
day, and when we reach the International Date Line in Tonga, we’ll have to
move our calendar ahead a day in order to compensate.
After two days out, we were still motoring and our wind was under 5 knots. We had good wind and a nice sail the first day with the onshore breeze to Isabela and its mountains, but by the time we got far enough away, the wind died and the seas have been glassy almost all the time. Most of the boats ahead of us have headed quite a bit south of the rhumb line (the straight line path) trying to pick up the trade winds. It took Anthem 3 days before they had enough wind to sail. We are also going a bit south, but not quite so far as the others. Our theory is that the distance will be a bit shorter, and when we do get wind, it will be on a more favorable angle for sailing.
Since passing Tortilla Flat, the only boat we’ve seen was a fishing trawler at dawn on the second day. They were fishing using long lines like the one that got caught on our boat, so we made a point of following their floats until we caught up to their boat, and then went around them. We also passed a raft about 8 foot square that was made out of floats and lashed together, and that was connected to a transparent dome about 2 feet in diameter. We didn’t get a good look at it, but perhaps it was some kind of scientific floating buoy or experiment.
We’ve
seen dolphins every day, including one group of over twenty animals, with a
half dozen or more jumping completely out of the water at the same time. We
also saw a pod of small whales, possibly false pilot whales. We saw these
on our first trip in 1997, and they are technically a species of dolphins
but with a blunt head and about 15 feet long.
Late on March 24th, about 4 -1/2 days out, we crossed the ¼ way mark. Our winds have been good since they picked up just after our 2nd full day out, and we’ve begun to make great time. With winds from the southeast at 20 knots, we are able to sail on the rhumb line at close to our hull speed (the fastest average speed without the affect of current or surfing down waves). In fact, through five days, we’re still on the same tack (port) that we started on (winds coming from our left side), and we’re on our original sail combination of our mainsail and our genoa. We’ve only adjusted our sails about 7 times in 5 days, basically raising the sails initially, then reefing them for a while when our winds got to near or over 20 knots, and then removing the reefs as the winds dropped down to about 12-14 knots.
The target speed we used for planning was to average 6.5 knots for the trip, which means arriving in about 18-19 days (April 8th), just a bit faster than our trip in 1997. So far, we’ve motored about 50 hours, basically two days out of five, and then only tried to stay between 6 and 6.5 knots. A good sailing day will be at 7 knots or better, meaning a run of 168 miles every 24 hours. A great sailing day is at 8 knots (192 miles). Only a few times have we gone over 200 miles in day (Antigua to Los Roques), and the past 48 hours (March 23-25th), we’ve gone over 400 miles, helped by a little current. This has been encouraging us to stay on our rhumb line, 150 to 200 miles north of everyone else’s course. It seems like we’ve avoided some of the larger and more uncomfortable swells they’ve experienced, and had only one short period of rain and overcast skies. Some of the boats to our south haven’t had clear skies for a week. We’re also now targeting an average speed of 7.5 knots, which would have us arriving in 15-16 days (April 5th). It is really too soon to accurately predict, but the near term weather forecasts suggest we will have moderate wind, and we still have plenty of fuel. We’re getting close to the point where we could motor the rest of the way if we had to.
The morning radio nets are getting longer as more boats start out for the Marquesas. In addition to the 30 boats in the Blue Water Rally, another 19 boats checked in on another net. This means that there are probably 50-60 boats actually at sea at this moment sailing between the Galapagos and the Marquesas. We’re approaching the peak time for making this passage, and we estimate that there could be 100-150 boats that will make the passage this year to the Marquesas. Plenty of company and safety in numbers, even if it seems a bit crowded at times. Actually, even with that many boats, it is rare to see anyone else.
Tracking all of these boats on our electronic charts every day takes some time. The chart picture of March 25th shows Encore as the red boat on the line on the top of the chart, with different colored circles representing boats for each day. We can make note of their reported wind conditions and get a better feel for what our weather might be like. We don’t track most boats that are a long ways ahead or behind us. Anthem has passed close enough to see one other boat, and many of the Rally boats pass within 50 – 100 miles of each other. The closest boats to us at this time are just over 150 miles away. As our course converges with the boats to the south, we expect to be passing several of the smaller Rally boats that started out several days ahead of us, and we may see a few of them before we arrive in the Marquesas. We’ve only heard of a couple of boats with any problems, one that ripped their genoa and are having to use a spare sail, and another with an alternator problem, which is limiting their electrical use.
March 26th and 27th – We’re still sailing on a port tack,
with genoa and main, now 7 days without any major sail changes, only
occasionally reefing the sails when the winds are stronger and shaking the
reefs out when the winds are lighter. For about an hour on the 26th,
the winds were very light, so we used this opportunity to run our engine and
keep our speed up, while giving the engine a little workout. We don’t want
to arrive and find out our engine won’t start. This also allows us to
charge our batteries and run our water maker without starting the generator.
This far at sea, the number of birds we see goes down as we are further from
shore. In fact, we are approaching the midway point, where we will be
almost 1500 miles from the nearest land. We did have a large seabird;
Jennifer thinks a red footed booby, land on the top of our mast, and stay
about an hour just before sunset one evening. We’ve seen or heard dolphins
and the number of flying fish and squid that we find on our deck each
morning is going up.
Our autopilot (named Jimmy after the NASCAR driver Jimmy Johnson), has been working for seven days without a break, and somewhat as expected, at about 3 in the morning, it decided to quit. The brushes in the motor were wearing a lot during earlier passages, and after it gets light, we see that they are nearly worn out. We tried to buy some spares, but none of them are the right size, so eventually we disassemble the motor on our backup old autopilot and find that those brushes are the same size. After several hours, most of which is used trying to find tools like a soldering iron that somehow are no longer stored where our computer list shows them, we modify the replacement brushes to fit the autopilot and get everything back together and working. These should last until Tahiti when we can get some more spares from home. Not having an autopilot would have been a major inconvenience since then someone has to always be hand steering 24 hours a day. Now, we always have someone near the wheel, but they are generally only making minor adjustments to our course or for the wind conditions, and they can take time to go below and check our charts on the computer or make coffee without having to wake someone up to steer in their place.
Jennifer
and Nancy are getting into a routine of playing Scrabble™ every afternoon,
and their matches are closely contested. Later they watch a movie on our
portable DVD player. Paul spends most of the time in the morning on the
radio checking in to the various nets, and keeping track of the positions
and weather conditions reported by nearby boats. We are all reading a
variety of books, and Nancy and Jennifer have gotten into the routine of
baking bread, muffins, and rolls.
By
March 28th, we had reached the half way mark, and continued to
have near record daily runs. For the seven days ending March 29th,
we averaged over 195 miles per day or better than 8 knots, compared to our
original plan of 6.5 knots. This streak ended on the 30th when
the winds went light and we finally changed our sail plan. Instead of our
genoa, we have our yankee (smaller jib), poled out on the opposite side from
our mainsail. This allows us to head more directly downwind and toward our
destination.
That sail plan lasted less than 3 hours as the winds were so light that with the large Pacific swells and left over waves, we were constantly flogging our sails. We furled in the yankee and motored for an hour to bring our batteries up to charge quickly and run our water maker, then went back to having our genoa and mainsail on a port tack. With light wind we have to sail at an angle downwind that is 20-30 degrees off of our destination in order to get enough apparent wind and momentum to reduce the flogging of our sails. Luckily the wind picks up a little and our boat speed is back over 7 knots (it was down to about 6 for most of the morning).
Late on the 31st, we saw the first sailboat enroute to the Marquesas since a day or so out of the Galapagos. It is one from the Blue Water Rally (Stella) that we met in Bonaire. We stayed close to them all night (Nancy thought we might run into them at one point) and only diverged in the morning when the winds picked up and we made better speed. The weather has not been great recently, with waves and swells disproportionate to the winds, making sailing uncomfortable and relatively slow. All night on the 31st, our rigging was shaking from the swells and variable winds which made sleeping nearly impossible and we expected to see something broken in the morning. Fortunately, nothing appeared to have been damaged, and at first light we made some adjustments. Late in the day we gave up carrying a poled out yankee and just kept our main up, resigning ourselves to a slow day. At least the winds were reasonable strength and from a good direction so we made fair progress, passing another two boats (total of ten so far) that left ahead of us. With the exception of the Stella, we only know of these other boats via the radio. Anthem is 400 miles ahead of us (they left four days before us) and is experiencing clear blue skies, but very little wind, and as a result they have started to motor. They have about 350 miles to go, so they can get to their destination in two days.
We are in a group of perhaps twenty boats still 600-800 miles out, and the weather for all of us has been deteriorating. One boat said they had rain for 36 hours straight, and two others had squalls with winds gusting to 30-40 knots. Our friends on Great Sensation broke a spinnaker pole during a storm, and have had winds vary from 10-30 knots over a compass range of 120 degrees. They told us on the radio they had only made 18 miles all day long. We’re now in overcast skies with dark clouds to the west and north of us, so we’re back on a port tack trying to stay south of the worst weather. So far, no reports have been of dangerous conditions, just not your stereotypical tropical blue skies and puffy white clouds.
As
it is April 1st (April Fool’s Day), Nancy has dressed up our
outboard motor with a University of Michigan T-Shirt, hat and gloves, making
it look like a person doing the “wave”. Signs that we need to get to land
soon…hopefully only 4-5 days.
By the end of the day we had run out of luck with the weather and began a stretch of three days of mostly cloudy and rainy weather, with occasional squalls bringing heavy downpours and gusty winds. It didn’t help that we had finally determined that four of our mainsail mast slides had broken from the slatting and we wouldn’t be able to use the mainsail until we had made repairs. To make matters a bit worse, the next morning we found that there were actually six broken slides, and we only had two spares.
Our options for sailing without a mainsail are to use either our genoa or yankee individually or together with one poled out. With strong winds (around 20 knots) we can make good speed with one of these options, but with lighter wind and larger swells, it is hard to keep the sails from collapsing, so we motorsailed for most of April 2nd and a while on the 3rd. After the heaviest squall went through during the early afternoon, the weather finally began to clear and the wind became consistent. Up until then, the wind direction had gone all around the compass. We poled out the yankee and started having a good sail that raised everyone’s spirits. After 13 days at sea, we had all gotten fatigued from the lousy conditions and we are becoming more anxious to just get to port.
By
moving some sail slides around and using the spares, we were able to
temporarily repair the mainsail and use it with one reef in it almost all
day on the 4th. Fair winds, smaller swells, and mostly blue
skies made for a good day as we closed in on our destination Fatu Hiva. We
are now targeting our arrival before dark on the 6th. We have to
average just over 6 knots, which means running the engine when the wind goes
down. We’ve heard that most of the boats between us and Fatu Hiva have run
out of wind and motored the last day or so, and we expect to do the same.
In the meantime, we’ll motor during the day at 6.5 to 7.0 knots so that at
night we can sail, even if slowly or at least run the engine at a lower RPM
to make sleeping easier. Even at 7 knots, we are motoring conservatively;
we could go at 8 to 9 knots if we were in a hurry.
Just as it turned dark on April 6th, we arrived in Fatu Hiva. We had traveled 3000 miles in 17-1/2 days, two days faster than our trip in 1997. We had been able to sail most of the last couple days, which was good as we’ve developed a leak in our engine cooling system. We were quite low on coolant and the engine had started to overheat, so we minimized our use of the engine.
Fatu Hiva is
reportedly the most beautiful island in the Marquesas, and sitting in
Hanavave Bay, it is hard to dispute. We will report in more detail our
sightseeing on Fatu Hiva and other islands when we update our logbook before
leaving the Marquesas. As this logbook entry is being posted, we have moved
on to another island, Hiva Oa, and we are online at a 4 star resort
overlooking the bay where we are anchored. We came up here to have lunch
one day and decided to come back to use their Internet connection.
Our near term plans are to stay in the Marquesas through Monday, April 24th, and then head for the Tuamotus, followed by the Society Islands (Tahiti), arriving around May 7th or 8th. We did get more sail slides from another boat, and have repaired our mainsail, and the coolant leak for the engine appears slow, so we can live with it until we get to Tahiti and have it taken care of.
We hope Spring has arrived back home, and realize we will be home in just over one month. Meanwhile, we are back in cell phone coverage and we can call our family and friends.
Go to Log 2006 Index
This site was last updated 04/14/06