San Cristobal to Santa Cruz Dec 16-17, 2003, 50nm

Leaving San Cristobal at 2100h Dec 16 we made the 50 mile crossing in about seven hours on a beam reach with winds from the southeast. We arrived off Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz in the dark about 0500. We dropped the sails and motored back and forth for a couple of hours until sunrise then made our way into the anchorage. Going into the anchorage we passed the sunken remains of a local charter boat which marks the location of the northern end of the entrance reef. We made a left turn and went in amongst all the other boats anchored in the shallowest part at the west end of the bay. We dropped our hook in four meters in between a large charter boat and a small fishing boat. There was one other cruising boat in the bay at the time, and her skipper came over in his dinghy while we were putting things away. He was a software engineer from Seattle double handing with a friend and was just heading over to Wreck Bay after having been in Puerto Ayora for three weeks. Rather than get a cruising permit in advance, as we had, he had sailed in and declared a mechanical problem. The Port Captain said, “Will six weeks be long enough?”

There were over fifty boats in the anchorage: private cruising boats, fishing boats, dive boats, and many large charter boats which took tourists on week long excursions to the smaller islands in the archipelago. There is no dock for boats to pull up to so the only way for passengers, luggage and supplies to be loaded on and off is via dinghy – it’s a short trip in to the dinghy dock as long as you have an outboard. Consequently, the anchorage in Puerto Ayora was very busy with high powered dinghies zooming back and forth between the large charter boats and the dinghy landing.

In Puerto Ayora we toured around the parks and private reserves, seeing tortoises, tortoises, more tortoises, land iguanas, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, seals and such. All the things that are said and written about the Galapagos are true – the place is a simply amazing natural preserve. Of course, all is not paradise. The biggest threat to the islands ecology, after the presence of man and all his ‘progress’, are imported species: rats, cats and dogs.

The clunking rudder had been weighing on my mind for some time. I had read several stories of KP44 owners having had rudder problems and one case in particular of a rudder failure at sea between Fiji and Tahiti. I didn’t want to risk being at sea with a broken rudder so I looked at our options. The nearest boatyard and haul out facility where we could get a professional repair was in Ecuador over 600 nm east. I could do the repairs myself in Puerto Ayora with the help of local workers. We could continue on our route until we got to someplace where we could haul out and hope that nothing would break before we got there. I decided that I would do the work in Puerto Ayora before we left.

A few days after our arrival in Puerto Ayora, Mary flew back to Canada to go back to work. Stephanie and I were taking the dinghy ashore the next day when two guys hailed us from a dive boat tied to a mooring across from the dinghy landing. They were looking to get ferried ashore from their boat. We obliged and so made friends with Richard and Mauricio, who were starting a dive charter business. Richard was a former charter boat skipper and Mauricio was an Italian who had decided to marry a local and settle in the Galapagos. They were eager to hear of our travels and, upon hearing that we had rudder problems, offered to help with the repairs. The next day Richard and Mauricio showed up with a gentleman who was ready to look at our rudder problem. As we explained the problem he asked to see the rudder. We explained that it was in the water so we couldn’t see it from on deck. This drew a confused look. They asked to go below into the cabin and look at our instruments and electronics, so down we went. The repair guy went over to our radar screen and asked what was wrong with it. I said it worked fine. More confusion. Long story short, radar in Spanish is pronounced the same way rudder is in English. I quickly learned the Spanish word for rudder is ‘pala’. I apologized to the radar repair guy and sent him on his way.

We took a break from boat repairs to go into town to celebrate the New Year. The streets were filled with food stalls, games of chance, and crafts. The locals have a New Years Eve custom that was novel and fascinating to us. They create life-size papier mache figures and scenes that portray significant events or issues such as the influx of foreign culture, terrorism, environment or local development issues, or are created by organizations such as the police. Looking over the scene that night was a lone owl perched on top of the flagpole in the center of the square.

Over the next days I worked out a plan for the repair. I concluded that I could pull the rudder off and reattach it while the boat was in the water. It’s funny how simple that sounds when you just say it like that. The actual execution of the rudder repair was somewhat more complicated. We completed the whole operation just in time. We filled up the water tanks with reverse osmosis water provided by another branch of the leading local merchant family the Gallardos. Stephanie used up the last of the tanks for a open air shower and hair wash.

The next day Dennis Burgess and Bob Jocks, our friends from Long Beach Shoreline Marina, came in via plane from the mainland to accompany us on our leg to Easter Island. With them they brought a treasure trove of replacement parts: tiller autopilot for the windvane; new inverter; 12V power conditioner, and more. It was like Christmas all over again. Since our new crew was in a hurry to get to Easter Island (they needed to make the once weekly flight back to the mainland) we decided to check out of Puerto Ayora and leave the following morning for Isabela Island.

Santa Cruz to Isabela Jan 3, 2004, 40nm

We departed Puerto Ayora at 0800h, sailing seven hours on a beam reach 40nm to Puerto General Villamil, Isabela Island. Getting into the anchorage required following a twisty course past a series of widely separated buoys that mark coral heads and rocks. The anchorage, once we were in, was about fifteen feet deep, sandy bottomed, protected by a wraparound spit of land to the south separating it from the sea, making it very calm inside. The only drawback was the half mile shallow lagoon to the east between the anchorage and the dinghy landing and road into town. The route to the landing is along the southern and eastern edges of the lagoon so the trip in by dinghy takes about ten minutes. We tried going straight across once but there are so many coral heads scattered through the very shallow water that we dinged the outboard skeg a few times.

The town of Puerto General Villamil is much smaller than any of the other Galapagos towns we had visited. We made our way in and did the mandatory check in at the coast guard station where we found the officials friendly and reasonably efficient. The station’s communication equipment was powered a large bank of gel cell batteries fed by solar energy. There were only a few streets in the town, leading from a large central square, with a very few basic businesses scattered about. We picked up some soup, pasta and rice and a few fishing hooks (that later rusted at the sight of water) and went back to the boat for dinner and warm cookies baked by my wonderful wife.

The next day Bob and Dennis took a horse trek up to an extinct volcano offered by a local tour guide. We must have gotten our signals crossed during our stilted conversation with the guide because what was supposed to be a five hour trip, all on horseback, turned out to be a ten hour trip encompassing several hours of hiking in the crater. Meanwhile, Stephanie and I did some sightseeing around town, checked out with the navy and got our clearance documents to depart for Easter Island. A large saltwater pond between the town and the lagoon was home to a flock of stunning flamingos and waterfowl – drawing the admiration not just us but also a trio of young girls. Visible from the abandoned concrete bulwarks on the shoreline were several Galapagos penguins. The men and horses were exhausted when they returned at dusk and Bob had developed a serious rash on his legs caused by abrasion from the polypropylene rope stirrups. On the way back to Wheatstrong we spotted a colony of penguins on the rocks south of the anchorage and drifted in quite close to observe them until it got too dark to see them anymore.