The Galapagos!

The Galapagos Islands (and Isla Isabela specifically) are an incredible place.  They’re a tropical island paradise.  They’re an enormous open-air-zoo, overflowing with all sorts of exotic creatures.  They’re a little nook of Ecuadorian food, culture, and hospitality.  The last couple of weeks have been absolutely delightful.

Sights and Scenes
The second I dropped my anchor, a pair of penguins began circling around the boat.  You literally can’t walk five feet without seeing some sort of new animal ambling along.  Some are prehistoric looking, some are cute and cuddly, and none of them seem to pay humans much mind. 

Every morning there are a couple of young sea lion pups that circle around the boat, eating little baitfish, and peeking up at me while I peek down at them.  I got into the water with them at one point and they were very playful, swimming circles around such a clumsy creature as myself and blinking at me with their long whiskers.

One morning, a huge school of rays swept past, and a number of baby black tip sharks have been doing the rounds through the anchorage as well.

There are vast quantities birds that hang around the volcanic islets surrounding the anchorage and at times, they feed with reckless abandon on the schools of baitfish that also call the anchorage home.  

The second you step on shore, an entirely new set of land creatures greets you.  The iguanas are constantly lazing around the shore in vast quantities and they never seem to be doing much of anything but sunning themselves.  

Several swampy, wetlandy, saltmarshy areas surround the town and there are boardwalks that make it easy to explore around them.  A few of them have resident flocks of flamingos that you can observe from afar.  

The famous giant tortoises of the Galapagos were once close to extinction (I’ve been unable to find turtle soup on any menus around town), but thanks to a breeding center here on the island, they’re making quite a comeback.  In fact, in my ramblings around the island I even ran across a handful out in the wild, perambulating around and nibbling on various leafy plants.

I’ve made a couple of excursions to explore away from town and each of them was really unique and exciting.  The first trip was to an area called Los Tuneles or “The Tunnels” which is an expansive set of lava tunnels, caves, and weird rock formations that’re west of town.   Some friends from another sailboat (the charming Chris and Paul from S/V Georgia), and a handful of tourists jumped into a big motorboat and we tore out of the bay with a couple of huge outboards thundering behind us.  The water was glassy-smooth in the early morning hours and it felt totally bizarre to be moving so fast in a boat after spending day after day not exceeding 5kts during the previous passage.  Between the noise and the speed it felt totally unnatural, but we soon slowed up when someone spotted wingtips sticking out of the water.  They were the wingtips of an enormous manta ray, much like what I had seen a couple days before, except much bigger.  

The captain cut the engines as we got close and the rays swam right underneath the boat.  I had never seen any rays bigger than 6-8 feet across before, but these were all easily bigger than 12 with some as big as 18 or 20 feet, which seemed astoundingly large to me.  The water was calm and clear and you could watch them effortlessly glide along just below the surface.  It was apparently manta breeding season, so there were groups of 2 or 3 of them cruising along together nose to tail.  I stuck my gopro in the water and managed to get a few pictures of them as they passed.

After a few of these incredible manta performances, we soon came to the lava tunnels and the captain proceeded to thread the boat into an intricate maze of passageways and channels, some with just a few inches of space to spare on either side of the boat.  His maneuvering was masterful and the rocks all around us were abounding with sea life.  

My best cactus impression

We did a little bit of walking around on land, and eventually everyone got in the water and snorkeled through the tunnels for an hour or two.  We saw everything from sharks to sea turtles, and all sorts of birds like finches and penguins.  The coral wasn’t super interesting or colorful, but all the animals and fish more than made up for it.  We even saw a few small sea horses hanging out in lava rocks on the bottom.

I also made a trip up to the top of one of the five volcanoes that formed Isla Isabela.  Volcán Sierra Negra had been shrouded in clouds for about 80% of the time I’d been in the anchorage, so I figured the chances of good visibility would be something of a crapshoot.  I hopped in a little truck with a handful of other tourists and we proceeded to climb up into the hills.  The land was all quite dry and barren for the first few miles, but as we gained elevation, there was more and more rainfall and the surrounding countryside grew quite lush.  There were a handful of farms and ranches that persistent Equadorians had hacked out of the jungle and the land looked very productive.  

We eventually found ourselves at the trailhead, buried in the clouds.  I haven’t been more than a few miles from the boat for months, and it felt weird to be back in the sort of mountainous terrain that I’ve called home for so many years before this voyage.  It was much cooler at elevation and as I started hiking upwards towards the caldera, there was a light rain falling and it felt like a million bucks.  It brought me back to fall hikes in the White Mountains and it made me very eager to get down to Chile where I’ll be able to be amongst the mountains every day. 

As I cruised along, I struck up a conversation with a couple of Argentines that I ended up hiking with for the rest of the day.  They had grown up in Patagonia and moved to Buenos Aires and had all sorts of interesting tips and advice for me.  They also really built up my stoke to get down to that part of the world and I spent much of the hike day dreaming about all of the mountains and sunsets I have ahead of me.  A large part of me wonders if I’ll ever be able to leave that part of the world so renowned for its wine, steak, beautiful women, and fearsome mountains.  I suppose time will tell.  

We hiked along the edge of the caldera (which was absolutely massive! 10km across) and eventually the clouds parted enough for us to see down inside.  Sierra Negra most recently erupted in 2005 and you could see where the fresh rock covered up previous eruptions.  The trail continued down the side to a smaller caldera that was attached to the mountain and as we looked out across this bizarre lunar landscape, the clouds eventually parted, revealing views of the rest of the island and the sea beyond.  The vistas reminded me of the time I’d spent in Hawaii, but these volcanoes definitely had their own character.  

Culture
I’ve been anchored in the town of Puerto Villamil on the south end of Isabela Island, which is the largest island of the Galapagos archipelago.  Authorization to anchor in the Galapagos is quite expensive, and thus I’m limited to just one island for a period of twenty days.  My timing was perfect, however, and I arrived at the very start of Carnival!  It was a five day extravaganza of eating, drinking, singing, dancing, and mischief.  

On an island with only a few thousand people, many of the Carnival activities were geared towards the kids, and there were rugrats running around everywhere hurling water balloons, spraying each other with colored shaving cream, and generally having a grand time.  There were lots of musicians belting out their Carnival best (which wasn’t really that good) and the sounds of celebration echoed out across the anchorage late into the night.  There seemed to be several beauty pageants going on, and it was clear that the competition to be named Ms. Isla Isabela was quite stiff.  I had a grand time drinking beer, eating little grilled snacks, and watching the festivities unfold.  

There are only two types of beer in Ecuador, and they’re both quite delicious.  They’re both quite similar to Mexican beer and they’re always cold and refreshing.  “Pilsener” is cheaper, more drinkable, and sold in large bottles.  “Club” is slightly more flavorful and a bit more expensive.  Food and drink prices are on par with or slightly higher than in the states, and after all my time in Mexico, prices in the Galapagos are pretty painful to endure.  

The people of Ecuador have been very friendly and outgoing and I’ve had a great time getting to know folks around town.  People in Mexico were more reserved, but I’ve had several old Ecuadorian men sit down on a park bench next to me to strike up a conversation.  Nearly everyone in The Galapagos works in the tourist industry to one degree or another, but they don’t seem quite so jaded towards foreigners as some folks can be.  Perhaps visitors to the Galapagos are a slightly more conscientious lot than most Americans that bumble their way through Mexico.

The food here has been delicious, and certainly a nice change of pace from cooking on the boat.  Plantains (which look like bananas, but are often eaten green when they’re starchy like a potato) feature prominently in a lot of dishes and much of the food harkens back to the time I spent in Costa Rica.  Seafood is plentiful everywhere and ceviche is a staple much like it was in Mexico.  Soups are also quite ubiquitous and I’ve had a number that really knocked my socks off.  Even the beef has been quite good, and the cows that’re raised on the island have a really distinct flavor to them, somewhat like grass-fed beef in the states.  Fruit is everywhere and always seems to be exquisite and fresh.

One typical breakfast is called a “Bolon” and involves a mashed up plantain ball that is filled with cheese and steak or chicharron, that subsequently gets deep fried.  They’re filling and delicious.  I’ve had a couple of fish soups as well as one with a bunch of little chunks of Ecuadorian cheese that was quite tasty.  

Engine Repairs
When I first diagnosed my engine issue (and before I started disassembling it), I figured I could resolder or tape over the leaky connection, put it all back together, and be on my way.  It didn’t end up being quite so easy.

The crack I noticed while I was sailing south was in one of the lines going into the heat exchanger (the engine is cooled by fresh water, which in turn has to be cooled off by sea water and all of this happens in the heat exchanger).  I’ve spent some time around engines in my day, but on the boat, I’ve only ever had to do basic engine maintenance (oil changes, filter cleaning, etc).  The previous owners must’ve decided at one point that they wanted a larger alternator, and when they were fitting it, they were forced to reroute some cooling lines to accommodate its bulk.

It was one of these re-routed cooling line connections that cracked.  The Swedish engineers that designed my engine elected to place all of these cooling connections right on top of and behind the starter and alternator (the only two parts of the engine that would be vulnerable to water) and you’ve got to bend over the engine at an awkward angle in order to access it, which I would have occasion to do for 25-30 hrs in the following few days.  The below diagram from the shop manual shows just how simple and elegant the cooling system is.

In order to remove the heat exchanger, you first need to remove some electrical connections, dismount the alternator and belt, disconnect a half dozen cooling lines, and also remove the bracket that holds the heat exchanger in place.  Once I got this accomplished, I was faced with a corroded, tired looking heat-exchanger, which upon further inspection, revealed more than just one crack.

It was Carnival, so naturally nobody would be working for the next five days, and on the sixth day, I wound my way through the labyrinth of streets to the much-lauded expert welder of Puerto Villamil.  Upon arriving to his shop, I wasn’t sure if I had the right character, as his shop bore a striking resemblance to a bike graveyard, but he assured me he was the man for the job.

He and his shop helper (who was in his seventies, without many remaining teeth) fired up the oxy torch and dove into the job with reckless abandon and in a matter of minutes he had breathed new life into my heat exchanger.  He did a great job, charged me just 20 bucks, and even gave me a ride to his favorite lunch spot on the back of his dirt bike.

It was in reassembling the heat exchanger to the engine that the true challenge began.  It has an inlet and outlet for both sea water and fresh water (four connections) and these four tubes, in turn, connect with four other items (pumps, thermostats, etc) to create eight total junctions.  Because of the way the previous owners changed these connections, it meant that I had to get six out of these eight connections just right all at the same time.  Unfortunately, I was only gifted with two hands, and because of the cramped confines of the engine compartment, I’m not sure an extra four hands would’ve been helpful anyway.  None of this would’ve been too bad if it weren’t for the nature of the connections themselves.

These cooling lines are all thin copper tubes that slide into their respective parts with a little rubber grommet and are sealed with nothing but a little soapy water according to the shop manual.  This is somewhat akin to sliding a straw into a coke bottle and expecting it to hold pressure.  Once I truly grasped this truth, I was somewhat baffled that I hadn’t had any major failures of this system up until this point.  Indeed the engine has given me hundreds of hours of trouble-free service without a single instance of overheating.

Thus I spent the better part of three days wrestling with these components, lubricating connections, contorting myself around the engine compartment, and generally cursing the bastards that designed this system.  Paul from S/V Georgia had spent a few years doing battle with a similarly cursed Volvo diesel and he had some sage advice that helped me along, but the unique modifications to my specific engine made things increasingly challenging.  There were many hours of despair, a few dubious modifications of my own, and no matter what I tried, one of the connections leaked as soon as I began filling the system with water.  Eventually, one afternoon, by the grace of god, all the tumblers fell into place and the secret to perfect alignment fell into my lap.  I fired the engine up and she purred like a kitten.  I rewarded myself with a gin-piña and some rock and roll music.  I was finally at peace with the world once again.  

It was then that I noticed the alternator was no longer charging the batteries.  “Shit,” I thought to myself.  “Probably all the water finally got to it,” I reasoned.  The universe seemed to be conspiring against me at that point.  After a couple hours of troubleshooting with the multimeter and a couple of re-spliced connections, I was relieved to find that the alternator wasn’t shot after all and the Rascal was once again fully operational. 

The Next Step
My time in paradise is slowly coming to a close.  I’ve met a lot of awesome people here (both other cruisers as well as tourists).  Folks from all over the world travel to the Galapagos and it has been fascinating to strike up conversations with them.  It is always interesting to hear other peoples’ stories and everyone has been friendly and generous.  My Spanish has definitely been improving over time and I’ve added a few, choice words of Argentine slang to my lexicon.  

Often times, the southeast trade winds will extend all the way up to the Galapagos, but unfortunately right now and for the next few days there is a period of prevailing calm that might mean I’ll need to motor for a while at the outset.  All along, my intention has been to sail out to Easter Island, and then back east to the Chilean coast with eventual landfall at Puerto Montt.  I’ve heard, however, that some boats stay close hauled due south for a while and make a direct course for Puerto Montt instead.  This would mean that I could complete the entire sail in one passage of roughly 3000 miles and 4-6 weeks instead of two passages of 2000 miles and 3-4 weeks each.  The alternate route would potentially cut a thousand miles and a couple weeks off of the overall trip, but I also would miss out on exploring Easter Island. 

The course for the first week will be effectively identical for either route, so I’m going to make the decision between the two options after I’ve been at sea for about a week, once the prevailing weather patterns in the southern ocean are more clear and I can gauge how much I’m pushed westward in the first few days. 

The next few days will be spent topping up tanks, buying food and supplies, and enjoying the comforts of land while I still can.  I’ll check back in once I make landfall again (in a month or two!), and until then, you can track my progress here.