00:44.955S 090:18.339W

We saw land at 0900 and almost immediately started to see dolphins, turtles and some whales:  welcome to Galapagos!

We dropped anchor at 1000, then again at 1030, then again at 1045 and again at 1100.  The anchorage was quite crowded with other boats plus had some rocky outcrops and shallow patches so we were fairly restricted as to where we could go.  First drop and as Mike pulled the boat back on the chain it was clear that the anchor had not set as Carol could feel via her foot on the chain that it was bouncing along the bottom.  It felt as though there was a cobbled street down there rather than anything useful such as sand or mud.  We bring the anchor up only to find that there is a large lump of lava caught on it.  Horseshoe shaped and so neatly wrapped round the hasp.  We have a clever hooky thingy on two ropes called an anchor thief which we had used in the Mediterranean to disentangle ourselves when we picked up somebody else’s anchor chain or they picked up ours, a common occurrence there.  Just the job for this but we also needed Brad as extra pair of hands and to provide the muscle required to remove the rock once we had the anchor close enough to do so.  No photographs because it all happened too quickly. 

Next drop and we just dragged again and then on the third go we found something to dig into.

Dancing Bear, the identical boat to Tashi Delek, had arrived the previous day and already had a visitor:

Once comfortable they take quite a lot of persuading to depart…..

We put our sea lion defences out pretty quickly in the form of a line of fenders along the back and they worked very well.  We would have liked to have some photographs of a sea lion on the boat but we had been warned that they can do some damage so we erred on the side of caution.

There was not much we could do about the pelicans though….