Heading to Galapagos!
The time has come, and we are so excited. All paperwork has gone through and at high tide this afternoon we will pull up anchor, raise the sails and head for Galapagos. It is about 545 nautical miles (627 land miles), and we are expecting about 8 hours of wind followed by absolute calm seas with no wind at all. We expect it’ll take us 3 or 4 days. Our friends on Zatara will be leaving at the same time and we will buddy boat the entire way.
This morning we loaded into the dinghy and Renee and her two younger munchkins and I walked over to the grocery store, while the girls went to the fruit market…it’s the divide and conquer provisioning approach.
The girls are so good at purchasing what we need, and are incredibly responsible. On the way we saw some little children working out in the mud harvesting shrimp.
They have a huge area to cover…
They spent $30 and returned with 2 huge watermelon, carrots the size of dinosaur eggs,
a couple dozen fresh croissants, a few dozen passion fruit, avocados, pineapples, 6 lbs of fresh shrimp, a few pounds of finger bananas, and a couple pounds of fresh peanut butter in a bag…because how else would you buy peanut butter!!!? It’s actually quite delicious.
At the store Renee and I were at, I bought beets, potatoes, cabbage etc – things that last a while. I also bought bottled water because the area we will be sailing through is once again pirate territory, and sometimes the way they have approached sailors is to come close up in their fishing boats and ask for water. People let them on board and give them water, which is when they pull out machetes and all goes to heck in a hand basket. If anyone comes close enough to ask for water we will not let them board or tie up to our boat but will toss them bottles of water.
Again, the good thing about buddy boating is that there is safety in numbers. We don’t expect any problems at all.
One of the unforeseen projects we’ve had to hurry and work on, is that the window in Mycah’s head started to separate. Danny showed Mycah how to remove the window, peel off all the sticky, messy black bonding nonsense and reset her window. She rigged up the bosuns chair, repelled down the side of the boat and went to work.
Check out the disgusting brown water below her. Since the earthquake last year, all sewage is dumped into the ocean, and between that and the water flowing in from the mountains during this rainy season, we feel like we are on the chocolate river in ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory!’
Danny and her worked hard, and Mycah learned a new skill and had fun swinging around.
During the process she did have a little accident…at first she had the dinghy tied to the side of the catamaran and was standing in it to work, and accidentally dropped the knife which landed on the dinghy, poked hole and fell into the depths of the muddy mess. Keith brought his patch kit over and saved the day.
In these last couple of hours we are cleaning things up from provisioning, getting checkout paperwork taken care of, and Emma and Anna are enjoying some delicious dragon fruit together. More fun times and grand adventures await!
Adventures of a Tribe 
March 30, 2017 at 1:55 am
So exciting…. Hope you have a wonderful trip….
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March 31, 2017 at 7:56 am
Love this post. Love you all. Please be careful of the pirates, they are more scary to me than the sharks and things that can bit ones toes in the water! What did the little children do in the mud? Love you all so much.
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April 2, 2017 at 9:07 pm
The little childr3n were digging for clams and shrimp to sell
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