You’d think reaching the Galapagos would be reason enough to stop, savor, and celebrate the achievement of a major goal. And it is, but just as every ending is a new beginning, as soon as you meet another crew…oh let’s say happy hour on the beach at the very pink Casa Rosada bar where seated next to you could easily be a marine iguana, the topic immediately becomes “the passage.”
There’s just a handful of yachts here in Puerto Villamil, Islas Isabela, Galapagos, but all of us are facing the same thing. Three weeks of open ocean passage-making to reach the icon of all Pacific Paradises, the Marquesas, the longest passage of our circumnavigation, so the nervous undertone…the buzz, if you will, is understandable. It’s all about managing currents, winds, the ITCZ, what about storms, fuel, provisions, and who is following the rumbline, or maybe some exotic hybrid course. It kind of hangs over what should be a just-plain-fun location.
Just yesterday Marce and I, along with the crew from Tehani-Li, piled into Catnip and headed out into the anchorage only to find a long line of combers, surf, kicked-up by the reefs in the middle of the anchorage due to the big Pacific swell and it takes a lot of swell to do that. Never saw that before. It would be a rocky restless night.