Touring the Galapagos

Feb 19 & 20 2014

So here is a kind of funny one. When we completed the Ecuadorian Inquisition, AKA, “Cleared In”, we were given a stack of department of tourism info. And the gal went to length to show us one particular map with its hand numbered points of interest. The best Internet, restaurants, hardware store, haircut, farmers market. The usual. So we set off on Saturday to find the once a week fresh farmers market. Pretty clear on the map. Except none of the street names were right. Except for Charles Darwin Ave. Thru streets turned into T intersections. Curves in the road did not exist. Worst map I had ever seen. Met up with some friends from a cat called Nexus. They had the same map and were having the same problems. So we went back to ground zero. That being Charles Darwin Ave.. And started over. Still no good. Asked a couple of locals and showed them the map. Lots of hand waving, chin scratching, etc.. No luck. Finally did stumble on a nice market area. Not anywhere close to the map. But got the job done. Not sure how, or who, pointed it out but it was a map of Santa Cruz. Not San Christobal. But both have a Charles Darwin Ave on its waterfront. Yup, we are sailing around the world! No problem. I got the right map for that. Hope we don’t fall off the end! Pretty well established that it is round but hey, you never know.

Did the daylong taxi tour thing. Hiked up to a volcano that is now a small fresh water lake. In the rain. Could hardly see down into the crater. We were in the clouds. Went to a tree house that is lodged in the oldest tree on Galapagos. $2. Small little shop and museum that a family runs there. Then to the tortoise game preserve. Where they have, low and behold, lots of tortoises. Then down to a beach area. Then got dropped off for lunch. Which by chance was the same place we had dinner. Which was very good. And quite inexpensive. $12 for a plate of seafood that would feed 2 people. $3 beers. But the beers are 20 oz. bottles. I guess they figure if your going to bring a bottle of beer on the island you might as well make it a grandee one. If you ask for a small they look at you funny. But they get warm so fast that you get rather toasted trying to drink them down before they get warm. What a quandary eh? Such is the adversity we face daily.

Tomorrow we hope to finally make the Kicker Rock tour. Other boats have made it and said it was pretty cool. We have been canceled twice due to our 48-hour expedition offshore to get 25 minutes of professional bottom cleaning done.

Virgin Islands Beer Club makes it to Kicker Rock, The Galapagos

Anchor alarm went off last night. Meant we had drifted a bit. No big deal but when I went out into the cockpit to check the surroundings I was met by a sea lion who had defeated my defense perimeter and taken up residence on the lounge there. Head on a pillow and everything. The light was on. Didn’t seem to bother him. He ARRRRPPPPed at me with a big mouth full of teeth. Scared the living S#@$#$T out of me. We were three feet apart. He/she was 4 foot long. I ran back in, to change my drawers, then grabbed a broom and went back out. Feeling pretty tough as I was now well armed. With a broom. Scared him/her overboard but I just don’t know how that critter got through my rather formidable defenses. I will post a picture of it and you see for yourself. Must have just got on board because he/she didn’t even have a chance to !#$!#$# all over the place. I have seen pictures from other boats as to the mess they can make. Picture 15 or 20 lactose intolerant toddlers who just had a quart of ice cream each. And no inhibitions as to where or when they go. The Sea Lions diet of fish and salt water makes them a veritable fish oil and diarrhea machine. They extrude oils through their fur and extrude everything else from the rear end. Merc has a video of one waddling down main street Arrping and sh@#$@ting all the way down the promenade. He was headed for the town square fountain. Where they flop in and do more of the same. Have to beef up the defenses tonight. Or pay the cleanup price tomorrow.

What I thought was a rather formidable sea lion defense plan. Failed.

So off we went on the kicker rock tour. Started at a small beach. Sea turtle and sea lion preserve. In spite of last night I still like sea lions. Well, maybe not that particular one from last night, but in general. Lots of turtles and a couple of sea lions. One skinny pup who’s Mom had either perished or was late getting back. Wished the little fella luck and on we went. Got on a small dive boat and headed to Kicker Rock. It’s a volcanic formation that rises almost vertically out of the sea. Mile or so off shore. Quite dramatic. It has split vertically a couple of times and provided for some very nice snorkeling and diving. Snorkeling in our case. So the captain figures out which way the current is going and drops us off with a guide to head through the rocks. Some very nice marine life floating by then two hammer head sharks swim under us about 20 feet down. Very cool. If we saw nothng else it would have been worth the trip. Dawn squeezed my hand pretty tight. Then an eagle ray, Galapagos sharks, sea turtles, a couple of sea lions horsing around. All sorts of life. The guide starts calling out “groupa, groupa”. Thought he meant a grouper so we mozzy over to see the grouper. “Groupa” is Spanish for group. As in group of HAMMER HEAD SHARKS. A school passes under us about 6 – 10 feet down. I think I could have touched one with my flipper. More hammer heads that you could even count. Dozens maybe. They just kept on coming. These creatures just glide so effortlessly. 6-8 foot long easy. Right under us. Dawn about broke my hand. It was incredible. The Manatee thing in Puerto Rico is pale by comparison. Saw 4 species of sharks of that dive. Black tip, white tip, Galapagos grey, and hammerhead. In one 40 minute snorkel. The Humboldt Current wells up from down deep and feeds microorganisms to the food chain here. And it is rather cold. The Humboldt Current. Kicker Rock has both the warm surface currents and the Humboldt swirling around it. The temperature change as you move around is something. Kind of like one side of the pool being 10 degrees colder than the other. You could see the thermoclines as you approached them. Like a blurry out of focus picture. Then the temp change. Never experienced anything like it. Without being the cause of it. If you know what I mean. Oh, and I got farted on by a barracuda!     What you say?     No kidding!     We swam over a school of barracuda. Maybe 100+. All about the same size, 2 foot long or so. 10 maybe 15 feet down. All lined up perfectly. And all of the sudden a mass of bubbles comes out of one of them and starts upward. And right at us. I think he aimed it. And I say he because a female barracuda would not have such manors. We were engulfed in this little cloud of bubbles as they broke through us to the surface. What else could it have been? Barracuda gas! Cross that one off the bucket list. Tooted on by a Barracuda. Dawn will forever deny it. But she got gassed. Same as me.

None of the pictures I took there are very good. The water was pretty clear but not crystal. And I took so many pictures at the prior beach stop that my battery was dead about ½ way through the dive. Which is to bad because I would give an eyetooth for a picture of the school of hammerheads swimming under us. It would have been wall-to-wall sharks.

It’s late and quiet as I write this up. I am in the cockpit salon and I can hear the sea lions breathing and coughing around the boat. They are probing the defenses. I hit them with the 2 million-candle power spotlight and they dive away. They almost always leave a little floating gift behind when they dive. Hope they find a better place to stay for the night. I am tired from the couple of nights at exile and don’t really want to stand lea lion watch tonight. And there must be a couple of dozen of the around Vivo right now. Maybe on a school of fish we are attracting with our lights or something but it is VERY eerie. Breaths and splashes in the dark. They sound very human. Always from a different direction than where you are looking. And on a very dark night.

It was a national holiday here today. Parades and marching bands and all. We had to cross the parade route a couple of times to get to the taxis. Trudging along with our wet bags and snorkel gear. I am sure we fit right in. They never noticed us. So now they are blowing off fireworks along the waterfront. So I have a beautifully lit up shore line with fireworks going off over it and snorting and belching sea lions at my two stern scoops. Don’t know which one to spend more time watching.

Oh, a couple of footnotes. Remember the dive boat that had engine problems and was low on fuel. Our professional dive crew boat? 70 miles out? They ran out of gas on the way back and sat for three hours before someone rescued them. Read post on getting kicked out of the Galapagos if you don’t get the inference. And on our way back from the Kicker Rock tour we ran out of gas. At the entrance to the harbor.  They dropped an anchor about 500 yards from Vivo. Water gone. Beer, none. Get me the @#!$ off of this thing.  And these are the professionals! They must have done this trip a million times and they ran out of gas? I had a VHF radio with me in my dry bag and I radioed for any ARC boat to reply. A fellow on a mono called Ghost got a water taxi directed out to our location. Dawn and I jumped into it and made it back to Vivo.  Another story in the can. The best part is you don’t have to make any of this up! This shit just happens! Constantly! What a hoot.

Dawn left today. She will be missed. Will not see her again for quite a while. She is meeting up with us again in Tahiti. Love ya. Miss ya.

I will, hopefully, get to post more pictures. It takes about 5 minutes to post this text. I take ½ hour to post 6 pictures into it. And lord knows I am a very busy guy, oh yes. We are very spoiled back home. With the speed of the Internet. I do miss it.

Did a nice hike to a fairly secluded beach. Snorkeled with many many turtles. A couple of species. Some sea lions but they pretty much were just lying around in the sun. They do a lot of that. Lunch at a Ceviche place that was really a shack in an alleyway. Dirt floor and everything. Beers, waters, 3 big bowls of excellent Ceviche. $24. Gota love it. And popcorn is big here for some reason. They throw bowls of it down at most of the places we have been to. And one place gave us salsa. For the popcorn. They explained by gesture. There is almost no English spoken here. Anywhere. Ever try to get salsa on a piece of popcorn. It just does not work. And not a tortia chip on the island.

Tomorrow we head off to Santa Cruz. Which we hear is a lot more commercialized. There we will pick up a couple of new crew. Iris and Kyle. Hopefully. One from New Zealand, one from St Thomas. So a lot of travel plans have to go right to pull this together. Each of them has 3 if not 4 stops before they get here.  Then some posts from Santa Cruz before we head out to the Marquesas. That is a three-week passage. I will miss San Christobol. I really like this place. Nice people. Good food. Cheap. Nice anchorage. Water taxi service for a buck. I could stay here for a very long time. Like the rest of my life.

All for now.    Peace

M