Galapagos Islands

Daniel, Ivan’s son, arrived from Canada to do the Panama to Galapagos Islands  passage with us. After a few days at La Playita anchorage in Panama, making final preparations to get away, we set sail for Las Perlas, the Pearl Islands 31 nautical miles south of Panama. We were all keen to leave the hustle and bustle of Panama and get to somewhere where the water was clean enough to swim in. Many people have this idea that cruising is all sunsets and gin and tonics, but I’ve found that especially when in a port, it’s all paperwork and hardware shops. Or, as someone said to me recently cruising is just boat maintenance in nice places J.

Dinner!

We sailed and motor sailed 4.5 – 5 knots to our first anchorage in Las Perlas, dropping the anchor at 9.25pm. The next morning started with scrambled eggs and tomatoes with freshly squeezed orange juice, courtesy of Carlos’ father. Carlos was the taxi driver we used while in Panama. He was a bit of a dude and eagerly interpreted for us in (hardware!) shops, took us to a huge fruit and veggie market and negotiated with the stall holders and carried our bags for us and then he invited us to his home to meet his family and share some food. Coming back to the orange juice – I was going to buy some oranges, but he said “momento” and rang his father and asked him to drop off a bag of oranges to his house which he then gave us. He was very generous and helpful.

Las Perlas was nice and relaxing and we were able to get some swimming in and Daniel caught three fish while we were sailing. After a few days in the sun, salt and sand we set off for the Galapagos Islands. To cut a long story short, it took us 11 days to make the passage. During that time we used the motor a lot because the winds were mainly light and against us. It was good to see that Brio is very  economical on fuel. Our days were spent watching flying fish (sadly no more fish were to be caught), dolphins, birds trying to catch a ride on our spreaders, eating, reading and playing scrabble. We saw more life in this ocean in the first couple of days than we did the whole time we were in the Caribbean. We didn't experience much rain at all, although others ahead of us were reporting on the radio continual downpours. On day 10 we had enough rain to justify stripping 'nekked' and having a wash. We certainly needed it by then!

We motored into Wreck Bay, Isla San Christobal early on Thursday morning. What a lovely anchorage and a lovely little town. We spent 5 days on the anchorage there catching water taxis into town. Very few people put there dinghys in the water there because the sea lions treat them as their personal bathing platforms. The shore and waters edge is teeming with sea lions - they seem to be a mixture of a puppy, a sloth and a slug :)

A slugfest of sealions

We spent a day with others from yachts on a snorkelling tour. We snorkelled around Kicker Rock which is an amazing rock towering out of the water. It was wonderful to be swimming amongst a huge variety of fish, turtles, hammerhead sharks (!), marine iguanas and of course sea lions. We also saw a bit of birdlife incluing the gorgeous blue footed boobys, brown noddies and the very pre-historic looking frigate birds.

Marine Iguana

The next day we joined a couple off another yacht a did a tour of the island. It included visiting the giant tortoise sanctuary where we got to see these giant creatures from young to very old.

The San Jose BBQ restaurant was our favourite place to eat as the meals were enourmous, tasty and huge. We had a very social time with other cruisers on San Christobal and went to restaurant twice with various people.

Bearded Dan at San Jose BBQ

Daniel left us here to fly home to Canada. It was sad to see him go as we had had a great time together and he was really great on the boat during our passage.

I was hoping to be able to swim withthe sea lions at Playa Lobaria, however they weren't in the water the afternoon we went there. Ivan got to swim with a turtle though.

We have now moved on to Isla Santa Cruz, the most populated island of the group. We are anchored in Academy Bay which is just off the township. The swell here is very uncomfortable and we are worried our anchor rope will chafe so we may not stay here very long.

When we leave I susect Gordon Gecko, our resdient gecko I discovered the other day, will come with us. He tends to hide amongst the fruit in the fruit hammock!