From Panama to Galapagos

You are never so close to death on a sailboat as when you have your pants pulled down over your knees! We both experienced this fact several times during the sail to the Galapagos. It was our first real long-distance sailing after the Atlantic crossing and we had kind of forgotten how rough it can be at sea and the most critical moments are when visiting the toilet and when you have to take your sailing clothes off or on…

It may not seem like a big problem, but if you are a little tired and inattentive, you can easily go straight across the floor if you don't look up when Anastacia goes over a wave. Now we both managed fine but there were a few times it could have gone wrong. This and other similar topics were things we liked to discuss during the sail. Then you know the quality of our discussions 😊. Except of course, when Christer shared his thoughts on whether time is just a representation of the expansion of the universe. At the Big Bang, time began… If you travel at the speed of light with the expansion or against it, does time change for the traveller? Without the Internet at sea, we had to guess as best we could on our own… Time may be affected by the speed of expansion depending on where you are, but was there nothing before the Big Bang? Not even time?

In this way we passed the time by in the 10 days it took to sail the 900 nautical miles to the Galapagos. As the crow flies, it is shorter, but to avoid headwinds, we needed to take a more southerly direction along the coast of Colombia and Ecuador before we could turn further west, towards the islands. We had light winds the whole way and sailed on a tack. The first day, the mainsail's trailing edge broke against the boom, the so-called clew. It had chafed against the boom without us noticing. Now we could only sail with a reef up, which was OK but gave Anastacia a lower speed and sometimes we had to use the engine as support. We had rain and thunder at one point where we temporarily changed direction but otherwise it was a fairly uneventful but quite bumpy sail as the waves came from slightly different directions. A few seabirds followed along and hitched a ride on the boat when they got too tired.

Christer surprised me as Lucia (Swedish traditional celebration) when I was about to get off my night shift on December 13th. He showed up with a handmade Lucia crown decorated with a little Santa Claus and holding a candle in his hand serving me cofee. The next day he surprised me again! He caught a two-kilo bluefin tuna which he then prepared and served. It was enough for two dinners. What a wonderful man! ❤️

The next time there was some excitement on the boat was when we were close to passing the equator. We make sure to write down our position every few hours and plot the distance we have sailed on a paper chart. This way you can manually calculate your position (dead reckoning) if necessary, for example if the power on the boat were to go out. We soon saw that we were approaching latitude 00 degrees. This set Christer off and he wanted to immortalize the moment. This should be celebrated! After studying the chart carefully, he went over to the digital plotter and saw a blue line that matched the chart's line for the equator. When there were a few minutes left, we loaded up a bottle of Prosecco bought for the purpose and two plastic champagne glasses were found. Now we would first offer a glass to Poseidon and then the moment we crossed the equator would be immortalized with a selfie. Said and done. The sea god was appeased with a glass and we toasted solemnly and took a picture when we passed the blue line. Shouldn't we see our position? I asked. No need! Christer said confidently. He had a rock-solid grasp of the situation! It wasn't until a long time later that he realized his mistake. We were still about 80 nautical miles north of the equator (!?) and that blue line on the plotter was something completely different from an equator line. A little disappointed, we realized that there was almost a day left until we could start writing an S after the longitude measurements. The next morning, we could see on the plotter how we slowly passed the 00 line but now the Prosecco was gone and the mood was pretty bad for both of us so a screenshot on the plotter had to suffice to immortalize the event…

The last few nautical miles to the main island of Santa Cruz we had good wind but risked arriving in the dark so we had to reef and sail really slowly so as not to arrive before the morning light appeared 😊.

The same day we anchored at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz a delegation from various authorities came together with our agent and checked the boat inside and out to make sure we hadn't brought anything illegal in terms of animals or plants + they asked us about waste management etc. on board. We were approved on all counts and received our tourist visas and were welcomed to stay at the Galapagos nature reserve. We took down the yellow Q flag and hoisted the Ecuadorian and Galapagos courtesy flags on Anastacia. Now a time of exploring the islands and the privilege of following in Darwin's footsteps awaits!

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