together with strong currents that can potentially work against you with 2kn, many sailors have taken more than 10 days to do those 900nm. a slow and very frustrating trip if you can't store enough diesel as with no wind, you get pushed back to where you came from.
our regular tank holds 210l of diesel - enough for approximately 420nm. not only for this trip - also for the remote areas to come we stocked up on jerry-cans before we left, extending our "volvo-penta-range" to 800nm.
we knew before leaving that we definitely needed at least 48h of wind to get us there.
and so we left when the weather looked right....and what a wonderful sail we had for the first 20h!
a current pushing us with 1,5kn - gentle wind of 15kn from 110°....maloo lifted of the ground doing 9kn speed over ground.
the pacific was well and truely "pacified" with a loooooong soft swell, so hardly any boat movement - simply wonderful!
slowly but surely the wind died (as expected) and we went under motor. 1500rpm got us sometimes 6kn sometime 4,5kn...depending on the current that started to turn against us.
night 2 and 3 were absolutely still with lots of phosphorescence, at some point with glowing torpedos heading for us, that when closer turned out to be dolphins...like a dodgy airbrush-painting we saw the glowing outlines of them playing around our boat.
the stars reflected in the mirror like sea surface.
on day 4 the wind came back - but not gentle from the side. right on the nose we had it and we were in for a rather uncomfortable 2,5 days heeling over to almost 30° with maloo slamming into the short and choppy sea the wind had built up.
but even though we had current against us, we were very fast....too fast in fact, so that we decided to "heave to" for a few hours to cook a nice dinner and relax a little.
no matter how rough the conditions were though, 3 red footed boobies decided to rest on maloo for the night...again leaving a mess. that so much pooh can come out of such a sized bird!?
the closer we got to galapagos, the more the wind turned into a favorable direction for us - more on the beam.
but we also did not want to get into san cristobal's port, wreck bay (!) in the dark. so we had to slow down more and more to a point we only had enough main out to give the autopilot some steerage.
with the wind on maloo's sweet spot (between 60° and 120° apparent) it is quite hard to slow her. with 6kn of wind she still did 5,5kn of speed.
but then the morning of our arrival came.
i had the last shift from 4.00am to 8.00am waiting for daylight off the coast. i got up and the smell of land was just overwhelming. just a few moments later a couple of sea lions came to greet us and going past the rocks of "leon dormide" we saw the first frigate birds and blue footed boobies.
we saw manta rays jumping up and doing somersaults in the air, lots of fish and turtles.
when we got into wreck bay i could not believe my eyes with all the sea lions sleeping in the sun, on boats, on rocks ....where ever they could get comfortable.
it took one of them just 30 min after we anchored to figure out, that there is "a new bed in town" - and he stayed with us till the sun went down.
what a welcome!
the next 2 weeks we will explore the islands and find a sea lion who will want to cuddle! ;)
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| "Ves Pos" stands for "vessel's position"....g'day southern hemisphere! |
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| león dormido (kicker rock) |
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