Day 1, Plata to Galapagos

We have sailed the entire first 24 hours of this particular attempt at reaching the Galapagos which is always nice. Mostly too much or not enough wind from the wrong direction, but it's nice not to have to motor. We realized today (Wednesday) that if we continue our relatively good pace, we might arrive in San Cristobal on Sunday. But we heard from another boat that apparently the officials want to come out to your boat as soon as you arrive, and the costs associated with checking in might be double for overtime after 5 PM and on the weekend. So we have tried to put the brakes on to make landfall on Monday instead. Sometimes the officials will let you confine yourselves to the boat if you arrive late in the day, and then take care of the check-in process the next morning. We'll try to find out if they will let us do that there.

One of the drawbacks of sailing more slowly is that our heading is almost due west, but if we go too slow, the strong northbound current makes us drift too far north. In less than 24 hours we are already north of our destination! But we sailed 95 nm DMG (distance made good) and are no longer tracking the actual miles sailed because we're keeping the fish finder turned off for now.

The sky has been mostly overcast and as the water temperature goes, so goes the cabin temps. It's been a chilly 73-76 degrees and very cold at night when it seems to be windiest. John is wearing his fleece pants and jacket and I had to get a sweatshirt for last night. I let Ziggy eat one flying fish and then I think John let him "catch" 2-3 more. By the last fish, he wasn't much interested in eating anymore! Two more came on board and I sent them back to the sea out the scupper.

We have two reefs in the mainsail and usually have the jib also reefed. Started out with the staysail up as well, but it got to be too much last night and we haven't put it up again yet. We had to stop last night to let two ships cross our bow, but haven't seen anything today except for a pod of dolphins that were eastbound on a mission and didn't stop to play with Nakia.

Thanks to everyone for all the well wishes and encouragement!

Linda and John

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