Fai Tira Blog Friday 5th March
Fai Tira Pacific Ocean 4:48.31N
81:30.50W
We
have now left Las Perlas en-route to the Galapagos.
The past
couple of days have seen us at two anchorages in the Las Perlas, Isla Viverous
and Rio Cicique, which were both lovely quite places to stay. The anchorage at
Viverous was very nice and well sheltered from the North Easterly swell. We anchored up with a few other BWR
boats and were immediately invited onto Natibou for a BBQ with the rest of the
crews staying there. I had a
fantastic T Bone steak that Hans has saved for me. John enjoyed the superb salad that
Monica had conjured up. We had a drink or three a enjoyed a very congenial
evening. The next day we all upped
anchor and headed for Rio Cicique. When we arrived we were surprised to see
about eight other BWR boats already anchored. It seemed that most saw this place as a
good last stop before the six day journey to Galapagos. A consensus of opinion
of the newly arrived boats was to take a dinghy ride on the incoming tide up the
Rio Cicique where with a two knot current you could switch your outboard off and
drift up the river in silence listening to the sounds of the jungle. The other
boats set off before us leaving us to drift and take in the commotion different
noises made by the wildlife. We
later discovered that most of the sounds were actually coming from Parrots high
in the canopy which were very hard to spot being green. We saw crabs climbing trees and a
magnificent termite nest. (Pictures
to follow when we have WiFi) We did
spot a bunch of Miss Tippy’s through the mangroves, a very rare sight
indeed. We had been invited onto
Blue Magic for dinner by Mark and Chrissie which we gladly accepted as John was
feeling a lot better. We had a
lovely relaxed evening where we put the world to right and discussed tactics for
the trip down to Galapagos. The
next day saw us dismantling the steering on Fai Tira as it had got very
stiff. We tried out the emergency
steering, which worked OK the quadrant and rudder being quite free. We checked the cables and they seemed to
be free as well. It turned out to
be the bearing on the wheel that was stiff. To get at it we needed to dismantle the
pinnacle and the associated compass.
We hadn’t done this before so we didn’t know what to expect. In the end the good old WD40 eased the
offending part and all was reassembled and free and working.
Wednesday saw us doing a few last minute jobs before we set off to
the river again. This time it was low tide and we walked along the river bed
that the previous evening we had
paddled down. The experience was
great, standing on a remote river bed on a sparsely populated island with only
Jungle all around you. The tide had
sculptured the river bed into an undulating sandscape which was very hard to
walk over and had patches of quick sand which luckily you only sank in to your
ankles. We did see some bird
species we hadn’t seen the previous evening which was nice. We returned to the Fai Tira to find most
of the fleet had left for Galapagos so we decided to leave as well and motored
for a while until the forecast fifteen knot wind kicked in. During this time I saw my first Manta
Ray feeding on the surface, it was about a metre across its wing span. We sailed although the night and managed
to cover 155 nautical miles in 24 hour period, not bad hey! I had company on my watch for a couple
of hours as a dishevelled gull sat right next to me until he decided that my
singing along to my Ipod was too
much for him.
Bye for
now Pete and John.
