To the Galapagos!

The distance from Huatulco to the Galapagos is 1050 miles as the crow flies and I ended up completing the sail in 12 days.  I crossed the equator for the first time in my life and managed to weather a stout storm, navigate some tricky currents, and make friends with a booby named Icabod.  Other than a broken-down diesel, there were no major mishaps and I made it to the Galapagos quickly and in good style.  

After a fun week of exploring, eating, and relaxing with my family, it was time to get back down to business.  The weather was my main concern, and I knew the high winds of the Gulf of Tehuantepec would give me a very narrow window for departure.  The forecast looked abysmal for the next week, so I knew I would have plenty of time to prep the boat and buy provisions.  

I accomplished a lot of preventative maintenance over the course of the week and, with the weather window fast approaching, I started to go through the motions of checking out of Mexico, which involves visiting a couple of offices around town, paying various bills, and notifying the officialdom of your intentions.  On the final day, I went to the ice factory to buy a couple huge blocks of their coldest, hardest ice, and bought as much cheese and meat as my ice box could possibly contain.  That afternoon, once I was all squared away, the lovely ladies of immigration came to officially "check me out".

I had examined and downloaded all of the long-range weather forecasts and it looked like the prime time to leave would be the following morning, so I anchored up just outside the marina and did cooked a couple of big meals so that I wouldn't have to do it while the boat was rocking around.  The next morning, I jumped into the water to scrub all the barnacles and growth off of the bottom of the boat (so that she would be as fast as possible, with no extra drag), gave my parents one last "goodbye" call via skype, weighed anchor,  and sailed off into the vast blue ocean amid a pod of friendly, exuberant dolphins.  

I had a light wind, but a strong following current, and I was making good time, but to ensure I'd get across the Tehuantepec before any storms brewed, I ran the engine as well.  This pushed me along at about 6 knots for most of the day, which is about as good as the Rascal is ever going to do.  That afternoon, just as I was losing sight of shore, I noticed some yellowish residue in the cockpit and I wasn't sure where it was coming from.  I suspected that it was from the anti-siphon vent on the exhaust elbow, which will occasionally spit out a little bit of salt water, but it wouldn't make any sense for coolant to have gotten in that line.  I cut the engine and checked the expansion tank and noticed it was low.  Shit.

Its obviously quite troubling to have problems with your engine at the start of a long passage, and I spent an hour or two debating a return to Huatulco to troubleshoot the issue.  It would mean missing my weather window, having to check back in and out of Mexico, and a bunch of hassle, delay, and cost.  The engine was still sounded great, wasn't overheating, and didn't have any water in the oil, so I decided to press on.  That evening, a fairly stout breeze sprang up and I cut the engine and sailed through the night, reaching 7-8 kts at times with the current's help.

After the excitement of departure slowly melted away, I slowly fell into rhythm of life at sea.  For the first two or three nights, I was still fairly close to shore and shipping routes, and I kept a fairly good watch, poking my head up every half hour throughout the night and making sure the Rascal was on course.  During the day, I read and listened to all sorts of books and occasionally, I'd fire up the stove and cook something.  

About four or five days in, I fell into a funk for a while where I really questioned what I was doing.  Did I truly enjoy being all on my own out here in the middle of the ocean?  Was this huge investment of time really worth it?  Should I just sail back to the coast and keep hopping from port to port instead?  I was still had more than 4500 miles of long, solo passages ahead of me before getting to Chile.  A wave of loneliness and doubt washed over me and for a few hours I felt totally smothered by it.

After hemming and hawing back and forth for a few hours and emptying all of my thoughts and motivations and fears into my journal, I decided to stick my head up and have a look around the horizon.  I was blown away by an absolutely stupendous, awe-inspiring sunset.  I cranked on some music, gazed across the vast, empty ocean and my soul was back at peace again.  

It is tough for me to convey with words the feeling I get when I'm looking out across the open ocean, but I would liken it most closely to standing atop a mountain.  It makes you feel really small and insignificant, but its also a feeling of hope and possibility and majesty.  All at once, you can feel the strength and power of a place, but also the vacuum of space and outrageous scale of the earth.  It is a truly awesome feeling.

And it was exactly that feeling that brought me back to my senses that afternoon.  I was sailing to the goddamn Galapagos Islands after all!  I had great weather, plenty of food and water, and enough good books to last me for months.  Sometimes there is no substitute for a great sunset and I'm grateful that this one was able to set me straight.

I made steady progress as time marched on and I sent my brother an updated location a couple of times a day.  Each morning, he would send me a short weather forecast of what to expect for the following 24 and 72 hours in terms of wind and waves as well as special mention of any nasty fronts or storms that were brewing.  It gave me something to look forward to each day and it was like opening a little present each morning - the gift of contact from the outside world.  

I was far enough out to sea that the wind was fairly consistent throughout the day and I could plan to make more easting or westing according to what was expected in the future.  In this way, I hoped to avoid any strong headwinds.  For the vast majority of the trip, the wind was either from the side or the back, which is exactly what the Rascal prefers.  

After the first few days, I didn't see much of anything.  There weren't any ships (not even a light on the horizon at night).  I didn't see any dolphins.  I didn't even see any whales (though I did hear one blow quite close to me during the night and his exhale sounded like the deflation of some super-sized zeppelin exploding in the night).  Most of the time I didn't even see any clouds.  What I did see, however, was boobies.  

There were brown boobies and white boobies and blue boobies and yellow boobies.  There were big boobies and small boobies and sometimes there were more boobies than I could count.  Sometimes there were no boobies which made me sad.  

One booby in particular must've been very tired after flying for so long and he decided to land on the back of the boat.  I expected him to be a bit afraid of me when I walked around in the cockpit, but he paid me no mind and decided to just hang out on his lifeline perch.  As the day went on, he did some preening and decided to spend the night, hitchhiking on the Rascal and making an easy 50 miles while he slept.  It was during the night that he earned his nickname which was "Icabod" on account of his tucking his head under his wing as he slept (which made him look quite headless).  Eventually some of his friends attempted to join him, but they were entirely less adept at landing on a boat that was pitching around in a swell with a gusty 15 knot breeze.  

My enormous ice blocks held out for the first 9 or 10 days and I ate like a king for much of the passage.  Some of my personal favorites were smoked pork chop sandwiches, steak and oaxaca filled poblano chile rellenos, as well as some bacon egg and cheese breakfast burritos with a chipotle crema sauce.  There was also a good supply of cured meat snacks and other tidbits to keep me satiated between meals.  Beyond that, I've got enough canned and prepacked foods to last for several months.  

My first serious weather of the passage happened about 8 days into the sail.  It started benignly enough with a wind shift to the south east (it had been out of the northeast for the majority of the passage).  It wasn't forecast to be anything too stout, but as the night wore on, the skies opened up and the winds started howling.  

I threw a reef in the main and changed down to the working jib.  A half hour later, I put a second reef in the main.  I procrastinated a while, because the forecast pointed to nothing serious, but eventually I went up on the heaving foredeck and switched down to the "jiblet".  I hadn't used any of these sails since I got to Mexico and it felt like I was getting back into real sailing again.  The boat heeled over and charged through the building waves and I could tell the Rascal was enjoying it.  By this point, it was dark out and there was an absolute deluge of rain falling.  Every time I poked my head into the cockpit, I came back totally soaked.  As the night wore on, it became clear that I was probably over-canvassed, but I decided to ride it out and by the time dawn arrived it things started to die down and clear up a bit.  The waves never grew past 10 or 12 feet, but the wind got up to at least 30 knots and was some of the strongest I've yet seen on this voyage.

As the day wore on, the winds continued to abate and I fell back into my routine of reading, navigating, and gazing across the horizon.  

On day nine, I started seeing some floating garbage in the water and it slowly continued to build and build until it was everywhere.  It would seem that I found a little corner of the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre.  After seeing not so much as a floating bottle for more than a week, it was pretty shocking and somewhat appalling to see just how densely packed the trash was.  These pictures don't really do it justice, but it was really quite phenomenal.  There was not a single square meter of ocean that didn't have a piece of trash floating in it and this continued for at least a dozen miles.  

I even saw a massive uprooted tree that I passed within 20 or 30 feet of that would've probably done some damage if I ran into it the previous night.  As always, I'm glad the Rascal is a sturdy old girl.  I would imagine this dense patch of debris can be attributed to the currents that converge and turn along the equator.  These same currents and weather patterns are also responsible for inconsistent winds and frequent squalls that occur near the equator and over the course of the next few days, I got up close-and personal with several of them.  

Seeing the dark, nasty looking squalls along the horizon was pretty intimidating and at night, with the moon light illuminating the rest of the ocean and these dark menacing thunderheads all around, it looked like a scene out of Lord of the Rings or something.  I was half expecting a dragon to swoop down from above and bite off a chunk of the boat.  

Finally, on the 10th morning of the passage, I spotted one of the northernmost islands of the Galapagos and bellowed out a triumphant "LAND HO!" 

It felt absolutely surreal to have finally made it to land after being away for so long.  The sight of that volcano popping out of the water took my breath away and I stared at it for almost an hour.  Somehow it felt incredible that this island could be out here in the middle of the Pacific, hundreds of miles away everything.  It was like no feeling I've ever had before.  

The wind clocked around to the south during that day and I had a light to moderate south wind for the rest of my sail, which was unfortunate, because I was sailing due south from then on out.  The south wind, combined with currents pushing to the west, no engine, and some narrow passages between islands made for some tricky sailing and i did a lot of tacking back and forth for the last few days.  

I was rewarded for my efforts by lots of cool sea life (sea turtles, rays, sea lions, tons of birds and dolphins) and some bizarre looking islands.  Their volcanic origin was quite obvious and while some seemed quite lush, others were nearly barren.  

That night, as I was threading my way between the different islands in the dark, I crossed over the magical imaginary line of the equator.  In all my wanderings around the globe, I'd never been to the Southern Hemisphere and I decided this was a major cause for celebration, so I cracked open a bottle of wine, fired up some raucous tunes, and had a little party out there all by myself.  Luckily, I managed to stay sober enough to drive the boat through the night and I ended up dodging a few boats that were transiting between islands in the dark.  

I made good distance that day, and I was hoping to make it all the way to Puerto Villamil that night, but the wind fell off that afternoon and I came up short.  The current combined with the lack of wind made for a tenuous night, using every little puff as much as I could to claw my way off of a lee shore without the use of the engine.  I eventually gained some offing from the shore in the wee hours of the morning, but it was in the wrong direction from my anchorage, so I had to retrace my steps the next morning. 

An 8ft wide ray swimming along beside the boat

The wind was still quite light the next morning, and it was really frustrating to be so close, but making no progress.  I decided for safety's sake it would be a good idea to see if I could use the Superhighway to move the boat around.  At first, I tried towing it with a long line from the bow, but the Rascal kept veering from side to side without anyone to steer her.  Eventually I decided to lash the Superhighway alongside, fire it up, and then get back onto the Rascal to steer with the tiller.  This sounds a bit sketchy, but I was careful about safety lanyards and kill switches and it actually worked quite well.  With the 4ph outboards just above idle, it moved the Rascal along at almost 3 knots.  Eventually as I was getting close, the wind finally sprung up and I decided to kill the superhighway and come into Puerto Villamil under sail.  I could see a handful of boats and a little ship in the anchorage already, so it took some fairly precise sailing to get to a good spot and drop the anchor.  Luckily I'd honed my quick-tacking skills during the night and it worked out alright.  

After a couple days and nights of constant, vigilant sailing, it felt like a million bucks to finally be at anchor again.  There was a nice light breeze blowing, seal lions and baby sharks swimming around the boat, and a beautiful blue sky.  I had finally made it!

I ended up averaging better than 100 miles per day on the passage, which is really good for the Rascal.  I only used about 5 gallons of gas to cover the 1254 miles to the Galapagos, which averages out to about 250mpg (better than your average Prius).  Overall, I'm really pleased with the way this first big open-ocean passage went and I'm charged up for the next leg of the voyage.  I'm going to spend the next few weeks exploring the Galapagos, fixing my diesel, and drinking cold beers while I still can.  Cheers!