Position Report on Thu 27 March

The Alba Chronicles
Neville Howarth
Thu 27 Mar 2014 18:09

POSITION REPORT ON THURSDAY, 27 MARCH 2104 AT 0800

 

00:57.93S 090:57.74W

 

We’re in Isabella in the Galapagos just about to lift the anchor, bracing ourselves for the 3,000 mile trip to the Marquesas. Here’s what we did for our final preparations.

 

26 March 2014   Isabella, Galapagos

There were still fifteen jobs on our To Do List - the biggest one being to finish off cleaning the hull.   Five days ago, Glenys spent a couple of hours cleaning the waterline and already we had green slime growing where she had cleaned – she had to spend an hour doing it again.  I spent a couple of hours snorkelling down to the deeper parts.  The propeller had a light crusting of barnacles and algae which needed scraping off; the rudder had a few large clams/barnacles growing in the more hidden recesses; and some of the through hull fittings needed the judicious use of a long screwdriver to winkle out big barnacles & clams - these are very fertile waters.

 

The rest of the day was spent pottering about doing small jobs and, by the end of the afternoon, all we had left was to walk into town to do our final provisioning, followed by another hot dusty walk back to the dinghy dock.

 

Two days ago, we told our agent, J.C. Soto that we wanted to leave on the 27th, but as expected, our zarpe was not ready and we’ve got to pick it up tomorrow at nine o’clock.  J.C. is a really helpful guy and tries to sort everything out for us cruisers, but the system defeats even him.  I dropped off our gasoline container with J.C. yesterday and hopefully it will be filled up by tomorrow, but who knows.

 

We had a quiet night in.  I’ve tentatively worked out a route for our passage. We’re going to hedge our bets and aim for 6˚S 94˚W, which is a course of 210˚, but this will obviously be subject to the wind direction – we’ll make sure that we use any wind to the greatest advantage.