At 10:30 the next morning we decided to head out for the Galapagos Islands, which is s journey of about a thousand miles or so. The winds for the first few days were looking good and after that it was going to be the Doldrums, which you all know mean no winds and scorching heat!
Well – let me tell you – we had 37 knots of wind on the stern and it turned into another Cartagena trip. We have now gone into a 3 watch routine so I am now doing night watches by myself – let me tell you it is VERY interesting doing a solo watch in these conditions! Still I am here to tell the tale. Just to tell you how interesting it got in the morning we found part of a fishing net on the end of the boom. So yes we had the boom in the water at one point!
As for the Doldrums – we didn’t come across them and we had a fabulous sail the rest of the way to the Galapagos. We stuck the engine on for 12 hours because we wanted to go an extra knot to allow us to get in in daylight.
The wildlife over was awesome! We came across a huge leather back turtle bumbling along oblivious to the rest of the world and really not interested in what we were doing. For several days we were followed by blue boobies who swooped around the boat feeding on the flying fish that we disturbed along the way. We were accompanied by several pods of dolphins who thought it great fun to frolic in our bow wave. A thresher shark jumped out of a wave behind us – just to remind us that ‘yes’ there are large fish around us.
The highlight of our trip was the fish that Nigel managed to catch. He caught an 8 foot marlin/sail fish – it was truly awesome – especially when it leapt out of the water about 30 feet behind the boat. There was absolutely no way that it was going to stay on the line and it duly ran away with Nigel’s line and favourite fishing lure. So somewhere out in the Pacific is a pretty ticked off sailfish with a fluorescent green and yellow lure stuck in his mouth.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment