At about 10AM we passed the biggest pod of dolphins we’ve ever seen. Would that be a pod or a pack? Herd? Gang? Cluster? Clump? I have no idea what a group of dolphins is called, but there were a lot of them. There were no less than 50 and no more than a hundred. They didn’t get too close this time and appeared to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

The hasty dolphins were unfortunately competing for space with massive amounts of garbage and debris in the water. We were dodging logs, lines, and all make and manner of human refuse. We spotted a bra, several flip-flops, an orange hard hat (no head), and about a million plastic water bottles. Why can’t they sell water in aluminum cans like pop? Better yet, invest in a glass and fill it from your tap. Let’s put the water bottling companies out of business. These plastic water bottles seem to be the scourge of all the waters we’ve passed through so far. It’s depressing to be out of sight of land and still be surrounded by its trash.

We finally arrived at an incredibly picturesque anchorage on the eastern side of Pedro Gonzalez near Isla Don Bernardo. There’s a long coconut palm fringed white sandy beach for us to explore, but that can wait for tomorrow. Right now we are happy to just take in the vista from the boat, and relax with a glass of wine after a long hard day at the office.

After a little coaxing we also managed to get the battery bank and solar panel back on speaking terms. I mediated the session and in the end they were able to resolve their differences. They won’t likely be best friends any time soon but they’ve committed to a positive and productive working relationship. It turns out there was a corroded connection between them (at the regulator) which wasn’t dealt with. It’s always the same with these things, something minor like that goes unaddressed and pretty soon you end up needing conflict mediation.

So after a busy morning we made our way over to another picturesque anchorage. This one was one Isla Del Ray. It was there that we caught up with our friends on Blue Jay. It’s funny how we always manage to find these guys. They aren’t stopping in the Galapagos but I won’t be surprised if we meet them again on some obscure Island in the South Pacific.

The sea has officially gone to shit. We are still working our way south a couple of hundred miles off the coastline. For those of you interested in such things, we plan to head due south clear of Cabo Mala and stay East of Isla Malpelo. This allegedly will let us get a lot of our southing done with the advantage of the south setting current in the Bay of Panama before we make our turn west. This will put us somewhere in the 3 degree range of latitude and give us a better shot of actually doing some sailing on this passage.

Sails up, sails down. Put in a reef and then take it out just before you have to put two reefs back in. Start the engine, put up the sails and turn it off. Tack, reef, take them down. Start the engine.

The only thing more aggravating than the sailing on this passage is the condition of the seas. You know how the Japanese depict the sea in those old paintings - kind of pyramid shaped with white frothy tops and completely disorganized? They had it right. This looks exactly like one of those paintings. Speaking of the Japanese, the waves slamming into the side of our hulls make it sound as though someone has opened fire on us with a giant sumo-wrestler-firing cannon.

With sumo wrestlers now being fired at us in rapid succession we slowly pound our way through these drunk and disorderly seas. On the plus side we have yet to be struck by lightening. Despite my best efforts Jaime refuses to accept this as a positive spin on things. She has this crazy idea that it takes more than just not being struck by lightening to call this a successful voyage. I remind her that we have not sunk yet and that this should also be considered a win. That didn’t help to change her opinion much.

A word on Jaime. She has been completely incapacitated by a combination of seasickness and the coma inducing effects of the drugs she is using to combat the symptoms of said sickness. She is in hell. Her time is divided between sitting in the cockpit when on watch, and sprawled out immobile on the settee. Currently the only variation to this program is the occasional bathroom break, an activity accompanied by much stumbling and swearing. Having painted this lovely context, you can see the significance of her never missing a watch. We divide our shifts up 4 hours on and 4 off. Jaime has been present for every minute of every watch despite her hellish condition. I’m proud of her and beginning to think that maybe she isn’t just faking this seasick business so that I have to do all the cooking.

The lightening and rain filled squalls continue every night. The sea is to rough for us to manage anything that could be counted as reasonable sleep. Birds dive bomb fish all around us and then shit them out on our deck. This leaves a red stain that is impossible to remove. I have no idea why their shit is red but I am going to buy the first slingshot I can find and shoot ball bearings at them.

Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation but these red shitting birds speak dolphin. They chirp and squeak and sometimes impersonate ships lights. They are white and fly low to the horizon in a never ending quest for meals of flying fish. Their white feathers seem to catch the glow of a nearly full moon and on more than one occasion we’ve momentarily mistaken them for a ships navigation lights. I wonder if these birds ever land? Maybe the squeaking and chirping is their way of asking the dolphins for directions.

One morning shortly after I finished cleaning the decks of flying fish and squid, we got caught in a drift net. These little boats bob up and down in the swell hundreds of miles from shore and set traps for us. They spread a net out for hundreds of yards. If you are lucky enough to spot one of the little bleach bottles that they tie off as a float every hundred yards or so, you may get some warning. Otherwise you just try to give these fishing boats a large birth and hope for the best. That’s what we did but pretty soon we watched our speed drop dramatically and behind us a small green line was slowly emerging from the depths. One end was caught on our port rudder and the other end was presumably filled with fish… and turtles, and dolphins, and maybe a baby whale; drift netting being the oceanic equivalent of a clear cut. Under full sail and with no way to stop our progress this was going to be a contest between the strength of that drift net and the integrity of our port side rudder. Why didn’t we just stop the boat and untangle it? Well dear lubber, you can only stop a sailboat either by using a maneuver known as ‘heaving to’ or by lowering your sails. At some point both of these options require you to steer the boat into the wind, a tricky thing to accomplish when you are hog tied to a drift net with the wind pushing you hard from behind. So at this point you can either wait for the outcome of the mortal rudder vs. drift net fight, or to unsheathe your boat knife and jump into an otherwise fair fight to assist the home team.

There was a moments pause to reflect on the fact that it was during a dark and stormy night the last time this boat knife was used. Jaime was wielding it and ran forward during a gale to cut our anchor line. This heroic act narrowly averted an untimely encounter with a rocky lee shore. Now I was hanging off the back of the port aft hull with one hand and slashing away with the same knife in the other. Foam and spray were soaking me while I hacked away at the drift net like a mad man. The lines that held slapdash in bondage were by now under tremendous tension. They were snapping and loudly recoiling with each laceration. It was a short but dramatic scene. Soon we were free and were able to heave to so that we could inspect the damage. Fortunately there was none and we got under way; anxious to high tail it out of there before having an unpoliced, unwitnessed, unwelcome encounter on the high seas with an angry fisherman.

After going several days without seeing another boat it was alarming to have a couple of freighters steam past us close enough to read the lettering on their bows. The Green Reefer came the closest. We were surprised to see that their home port wasn’t Jamaica. A name like that has to be a product of bad planning. How can you roll into any port in a mid sized freighter named the Green Reefer without attracting the suspicions of the port authorities?

Later in the day we had to heave to again in order to get the diesel out of happy the big blue barrel. I was so preoccupied with buying, transporting, filling and securing happy the big blue barrel into our cockpit that I didn’t give much thought to how we would actually get the diesel out of the thing when we needed to. I started with the most complicated but stylish option imaginable. After tearing the boat apart looking for parts, I built an alien looking contraption from an old bilge pump, various plumbing fittings and some old hoses and clamps that were lying around. I wired a 12 volt plug into the thing and was feeling pretty smug. As it turns out, my smugness was both premature and unwarranted. The stupid piece of shit didn’t work at all. It was a complete waste of time and pretty soon I was siphoning diesel from happy the big blue barrel with a chunk of garden hose. It may not have been nearly as stylish or sexy as my whiz bang contraption, but as Jaime was only too happy to point out; it was considerably more effective.

After dieseling up, a deep blue swim and some lunch, we got under way. We are starting to like this ‘heave to’ thing. It doesn’t do much for supporting our required 4.3 knot average but when things start getting too much to handle it’s a nice little break. The motion of the boat calms down and you can actually relax a little without being pulverized by waves and thrown around the cabin.

You know how in the movies when they show a boat and crew being battered about by a big storm? It’s always the same thing. Things are washed around the deck, people are pitched around and thrown overboard. Waves crash over the boat and stove in the portholes. Amidst all this chaos some guy bravely lashes himself to the helm and the camera pans back showing the boat careening down the face of some monstrous wave. Then the scene fades out and we pick up the story the next day under a blue sky and hot sun. People are just beginning to stir while the camera pans over the scene showing you the horrid aftermath of the great storm. Lines tangled everywhere, a broken mast, bodies sprawled out; that kind of stuff.

It’s total crap. They got the first part right though. From what we’ve seen the general anarchy and wanton destruction has been depicted pretty accurately. Taking the helm in your hands and the sea in your teeth, that’s happens too. So the total crap part then? It’s never calm and sunny the next morning. We have been getting the shit kicked out of us for days now. The sky will lighten just enough to give us hope, maybe an hour or two before you realize that the big black clouds full of lightening and badness haven’t forgotten about you and are coming back to finish the job. It’s a war of attrition you will eventually lose.

The extreme forces at work twisting, dropping and slamming our boat have worked a couple of deck fittings loose. Unable to fix them in these conditions we can only spread towels around to collect the water that streams through into the cabin and bail out the bilge from time to time. We were getting 25 knots from the southwest the last time out wind vane worked. Now it’s broken and we can only guess at the winds speed and direction. The bumper, a heavy gauge rubber stripping that wraps around the hull has been torn off the port side from stem to stern. Our engine won’t start and the battery bank is on the fritz again, these two items are undoubtedly connected. Our Panama flag has been torn to shreds by the elements, and our Canadian flag is starting to succumb to the barrage as well. There’s water everywhere and we sleep fully clothed and in our jackets. Not out of necessity, out of exhaustion. This morning my breakfast consisted of a can of beans which were opened and eaten straight from the can with a spoon. Jaime didn’t eat anything. We sleep (if you can call it that), we take shifts on watch, and once in a while we try to eat something. Speaking has been reduced to necessity. Things like, "get up it’s your shift".

We’ve had two whale encounters. The idea of a killer attack whale sinking your boat is frankly absurd to us, but people keep talking about it. It’s also getting hard to ignore all the warnings, and some are actually from reputable sources. For example, in an uncharacteristic departure from its curt no nonsense prose outlining global wind, current and navigational information, the fifth edition of "World Cruising Routes" by Jimmy Cornell, the same book we have used to plan our trip, says this:

"This route passes through an area where collisions with whales and attacks by whales have been reported, so it pays to treat whales with suspicion and not approach or make them feel threatened unnecessarily."

It was with this in mind that we treated the whales we encountered very suspiciously indeed. It’s a good thing we read that or we could have inadvertently taunted them, making the whales feel "unnecessarily threatened". I wonder under what circumstances would a person find it "necessary" to threaten a whale?
I can just see Jaime up on the bow screaming:

"hey you blubbery bastards, you call yourselves mammals? Come any closer and I’ll punch the barnacles off you".

Then when she came back to the cockpit I would say:

"Wow Jaime, were those threats really necessary?"

But it would be too late. We would by then be under full fledged whale attack. After being lost at sea the tombstones above our empty graves would be inscribed:

- Here should lie Jaime and Seth but they were sunk while out fishin. They should have headed Jimmy’s warning and treated those whales with more suspishin

Truth be told it actually was a good thing I happened to be sitting at the helm at the time. There were a half dozen black whales dozing on the surface (I can’t be sure that they were dozing, that’s just a guess). They looked like killer whales, but a little bigger and all black (Pilot Whales?). They had rounded sloped dorsal fins and we were headed straight for them. If we hadn’t spotted them, or them us, we would have collided. But we did spot them and so I turned the wheel hard over to port. This would keep the wind in our sails and avoid threatening the whales unnecessarily. The thing is, and this made us very suspicious indeed, is that they spotted us at about this time and actually moved right into our path. I brought the helm back to starboard at which point they kind of split up and let us go through the middle. Then a couple of the whales that were now on our starboard side started heading straight for the side of our boat. They crashed into the hull and opened up a 3 foot hole just below the waterline! Okay, that part didn’t happen. But they did pass only a couple of feet underneath of us. We could clearly see their backs as they did and all we could do was sit there and flinch while waiting for the big crash that never came. I think they just got separated in the confusion and were trying to join up with the rest of the posse on the other side of us.

Our second encounter a couple of hours later wasn’t nearly as harrowing. A few whales of the same
description surfaced about 50 feet off our port side. They stuck around for a minute or two and then disappeared.

We didn’t see any more whales, but watched our depth sounder range from 50 feet to 15 feet over the course of that night and the next day. Were they following us? Waiting until we dozed off so that they could mount a surprise attack and sink us? We’ve had the depth sounder phenomenon happen before but it usually just registers a hit and then starts flashing again which means that it’s too deep to register bottom. This thing stayed with us for hours though. Worried that we were off course we actually consulted two different sources for the charted depths in the area. For hundreds of miles around us there was absolutely nothing less than several thousand feet of water beneath us, and yet here we were with something big enough to register a hit on the sonar following along only a few meters beneath us. That conjures up some strange feelings when you are alone on watch in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean.

Greetings from the southern hemisphere! Shortly after 5PM yesterday we crossed the equator. It took a little effort but we mustered up enough enthusiasm to pop the top off a bottle of champagne, go for a skinny dip and eat some brie with little crackers that Jaime produced from somewhere. We spent some time trying to get pictures of ourselves and of the GPS showing 0.00.00 degrees of latitude. These things show your position to six decimal points though, so that proved to be a little harder than it sounds.

We finally arrived in Santa Cruz yesterday afternoon. The Galapagos archipelago fought to keep its secrets from us until the bitter end. We bashed and crashed our way right into the harbor. We’ve decided that instead of facing the ocean again we will scuttle the slapdash, move inland and open up a diner serving Finch Fries, Blue Footed Booby Burgers, and Turtle Cakes.

We are anchored in Academy Bay. A rolly, pitching, busy commercial anchorage completely exposed to the Pacific swell. We’ve set about trying to repair the damage done to ourselves and the boat. Crew and vessel alike are scraped and bruised but immensely relieved. For the sad state that we are in we must have done something right because we completed the passage in 8 and a half days when we were told that 9 was on the low side, the average being closer to 11 or 12.

We had 2 really great days with calm seas and nice winds but the other 6 were terrible. Six days is a long time to be bashed about, but no matter how hard and shitty things became we carried on. Don’t give us any credit though, our perseverance was nothing admirable. We did not carry on due to some exceptional fortitude. Not because we are tougher or smarter than the average bear. No, we carried on because there were absolutely no other options available to us at the time. If there were, I’m sure we would have jumped at them. We would have sold our souls and clawed over top of each other for them but the problem was that there were no ‘oh shit’ buttons available. You can’t call a friend or use a trump card. We tried rubbing a magic lamp, no genie. We clicked our heels and said there’s no place but home, no luck.

Maybe you could be labeled brave for deciding to do something like this, but once out in the middle of the ocean with sumo wrestlers being fired at the side of your boat you are just trying to save your ass like everyone else. There never was a more cowardly act but it truly is amazing what you are capable of when you have no choice.

When we decided to do this we were ignorant and knew it. With no experience it was easy to say ‘let’s go for it’. That’s not brave, it’s not knowing any better. Ignorance was not only bliss, it was our secret weapon. Unfortunately we aren’t ignorant anymore. We have experienced the sumo-wrestler-firing cannon, feared the worst and know exactly what ocean crossings can be like. For this reason we have decided to sell Finch Fries and Turtle Cakes to tourists here on Isla Santa Cruz.