Harmonie - Puerto Ayora and Preparation for the Longest Sailing Leg on Earth

Puerto Ayora and Preparation for the Longest Sailing Leg on Earth

Harmonie

Don and Anne Myers

Sun 9 Mar 2008 13:52

00:44.827S 90:18.414W

Attached are two pictures. The first was taken from our boat, looking out at all the other rally and non-rally boats anchored here in Academy Bay. The second is the fish market in town. Note the fish piled on the ground and on the table to the right, and the four or five pelicans lined up behind the man in the white shirt - waiting for some tasty scraps to come their way.

We are leaving Sunday (3/9) on the longest sailing leg on earth. Ok, not really. We are leaving, and it will be the longest sailing leg of the whole trip at approximately 2,980 miles, but it's probably not the longest sailing leg on earth - it will only feel that way to us. We expect it to take about three weeks. Wow. Three weeks is a lot longer than nine days. Nine days is the longest sailing leg we've completed so far (Norfolk to St. Thomas). We are pretty sure we'll survive just fine, but we are hoping not to do a lot of motorslogging for a couple of reasons...

First, we never received the new seal for our transmission because it never shipped. The company Don was working with via email asked us four days running to confirm the shipment. Since we only download email once per day, we didn't realize they didn't ship after each time we confirmed because we didn't pick up new emails until 24 hours later. We are not sure why they were so reluctant to ship, it might have had something to do with the $350ish shipping cost. In the end, Don said forget it...it's not worth the close to $1,000 it would take to purchase, ship and pay duty on the stupid seal (that probably only costs a few bucks to produce) and he canceled the order. So, what will we do you ask? Never fear, Super Don, the fixit man is here. Don concocted a new seal out of two o-rings supplied very kindly to us for the cost of a bottle of wine from a non-rally boater anchored close by. A couple of o-rings, some silicone grease and we are ready to go. It's not that we don't have faith in Super Don's concocted transmission seal....but we plan to try very hard not to run our engine endlessly like we did during the famous motorslog. If it takes us longer than three weeks to get to the Marquesas, so be it. We have enough food on board to last us three months. And if things get really tough, we did buy some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in case of emergency. Also, there is no rally-related deadline until Tahiti, and we've got until April 30th to get there. In the meantime, rally boats will be cruising on their own throughout the Marquesas and Tuamotu island groups on the way to Tahiti. Sounds good to us. We could use a little R&R anchored in a beautiful bay off some exotic and unpopulated island. We haven't been able to do that since before the rally started when we were in Martinique (which is populated, of course, but still nice). I know, I know, your hearts collectively bleed for us.

Second, even if we attempted to motorslog all the way to the Marquesas, we wouldn't make it. Neither we, or any other sailboat we are aware of has enough fuel capacity to motor 2,980 miles.

So we will sail. We may sail very slowly, but we will do our best. The weather forecast we received today (Saturday) as part of our pre-departure 'skipper's briefing' was not encouraging. No high winds or scary storms. Oh no. Just the opposite. Until we get far enough south, there will be very little wind. Far enough south has been defined as 5 degrees latitude. We are now at 0 degrees 44 minutes latitude. That means we would have to head due south for roughly 260 miles to hopefully pick up some wind. That's close to three days at a very slow pace. And we won't head directly south, the routing advice we received suggested we head southwest as best we can until we hit 5 degrees latitude. Heading southwest means a longer distance, but not necessarily a longer time before we pick up good wind. We have agreed that we will tough it out even if it means a few days with very little progress.

That's the weather forecast. Now, moving on to fuel. Because we motored so much getting here from Ecuador, we were down about 100 gallons of fuel. Originally, we were set up to receive fuel from a fuel barge that would come directly to our boat at anchor. However, because we heard bad things from other boaters concerning the quality of this fuel (water and general debris mixed in with the diesel) and because the cost of this barge fuel is $2.35/gallon (not a bad price when compared with prices in the US, but high for Ecuador), we decided we would be better off lugging fuel to our boat by jerry jug. I've described the jerry jug lugging process in a previous blog entry from Panama. But this was jerry jug lugging on a whole new level. In Panama, we (really my brother Bill) lugged a couple of jerry jugs from the fuel dock to our boat (a long walk). Then the marina, taking pity on us, used their dinghy to deliver the rest of the jerry jugs directly to our boat. That time we only needed about 30 gallons. This time we needed three times that amount and the process was much more complex...

First, we pooled resources with several other boats and collected about 20, five gallon jerry jugs. Then, we hailed a water taxi and four of us (Don, myself and Suzanne and Michael from the American boat Maalmani) jumped in a water taxi with our 20 jerry cans and then unloaded them all onto the dock. From there, we hailed a taxi (all of them here are double cab 4x4's, which was perfect for what we had to do) and Suzanne and Michael made the first trip to the gas station to fill the 20 jerry jugs. Once they arrived at the gas station (where the price for diesel was $1.02/gallon, by the way), they had to visit the Fuel Administrator in her office at the gas station, and obtain permission to purchase 100 gallons of diesel (seriously, we had to get permission before they would pump the fuel - and not just us, everyone had to do this). The taxi driver filled the jerry jugs, Suzanne and Michael paid in cash (a very common occurrence here in the Galapagos where we have not used our credit card once) and headed back to the dock where Don and I were waiting. From there we lugged the full jerry jugs to a water taxi (and pretty much filled the water taxi to capacity) and motored out to Maalmani. Once we arrived at the boat, we lifted all 20 jerry cans from the water taxi up onto the deck of the boat - without losing any overboard. Once that was successfully completed, Don and Suzanne dumped all 100 gallons into Maalmani (not a fast process) and we repeated the entire sequence of events, this time dumping the 100 gallons into Harmonie. As a side note, Don and Michael mysteriously disappeared while Suzanne and I were at the gas station, which left the two of us weakling women to lug the jerry jugs from the land taxi to the water taxi and then up onto the deck of Harmonie (we did get help from sympathetic taxi drivers). The men folk showed up on Harmonie sporting some new fishing gear after Suzanne and I had already emptied a good number of the jerry jugs into the tank. Don finished the empting task and we then repeated the entire sequence of events for a third time. This was done such that we could return the jugs to their owners full of diesel as thanks for their use (BlueFlyer and Graptolite paid for the fuel, but we paid with our sweat and labor to fill them). So, in that fashion, the four of us lugged a total of 300 gallons to a total of four boats. This entire endeavor took us from 8am to 3:30pm to complete on Friday. And all done in the usual sweltering heat. Again, I know, your collective hearts bleed for us. Can't beat that $1.02/gallon though, can you?

That's the weather forecast and the fueling story. Now food. We did manage to scrape up enough of the leftover produce at the farmer's market on Saturday to last us maybe half the trip. The other half of the trip will involve canned fruit and frozen vegetables. Puerto Ayora is a very small town with only one small grocery store. The Blue Water Rally left earlier in the week for the Marquesas, so the food store had already gotten one good workout. Next, crew from our forty rally boats hit the food store like a plague of locusts. Don and I checked the store out at 2pm on Saturday and there was literally nothing left on the shelves except some rotted produce, a stick of butter and a case of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Ok, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was pretty bad. We were able to buy what we needed and truly have enough on board to last several months - especially if Don overcomes the triple twist, double back flip freedom move employed by fish in the Pacific.

Ok, that covers, weather, fuel and food...what's left? Oh, right, the farewell party. Which was very nice. Oscar was there (in his outgoing way, he has chummed up with one of the rally employees). He did indeed go surfing, but in his quest for the perfect wave, he managed to dislocate his shoulder. Ouch! A fast trip to the local clinic and his shoulder was put back in place. A few tablets of valium later, Oscar was ok. When we saw him Friday, he was in good spirits, but the injury definitely put a damper on his Galapagos plans. He flew home on Saturday and later that day I ran into a girl from the rally boat Kasuje. She asked if we were the boat Oscar had sailed on (figures she would have met him too!) and when I asked if she had heard about Oscar's shoulder, she said, 'Who hasn't? When he introduces himself, he follows the introduction up with, 'Did you hear about what I did to my shoulder?" I think she was exaggerating, but I giggled anyway. At the farewell party, Don and I won a stuffed sea lion for bringing Oscar with us to the islands. We promptly named the sea lion, what else but, Oscar. When you pinch the sea lion's shoulder, it barks just like the real Oscar does (honest it really does). I already described the Whitbread tribute to the blue footed boobie in a previous blog entry - that was also one of the highlights of the night.

So that about wraps it up. It's 4:30am Sunday morning and I haven't been to bed yet - too busy trying to get all the blog updates done so Don can run into town later this morning and send all the updates at the internet place. We won't be able to send many pictures after we set sail, so we wanted to get them all off before we left on our mega voyage. Sorry for the long entries, but this week was jam packed with activity and the Galapagos really deserved some blog attention. What a fabulous place. It's unlikely that we will ever get to the Galapagos again, but if the opportunity arises, we will certainly return. It's everything you've ever read it would be and more. The friendly, extremely helpful people make it just that much better.

Here's to hoping Lonesome George finally decides that girls are interesting.

The next update will probably be on Monday when we should be happily sailing southwest.

Anne