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Makena - Pacific Crossing Day 1



05-03-2015 Thursday
Noon Position 02º 48’S 092º 33’W

Thanks to the World Arc organizers & their agent we had a super easy check out from the Galapagos - we just showed up at a local cafe en masse and they had immigration officers there for us. 

The islands and the waters around them are really teeming with unusual wildlife… unusual for this Irish woman, at least. Kai is more aware of his surroundings than ever and so he is probably more familiar now with seals, pelicans and marine iguanas than cows, crows or cats! We did some great tours but took it easy every second day since it is just so hot here by 8am. Highlights were definitely the seeing the giant tortoise nursery, seeing penguins and a sea horse in the wild, snorkeling with huge turtles, and the Kicker Rock tour where we must have seen 1 million fish … we saw 3 BIG hammerhead sharks as we snorkeled above them with Kai! At Kicker Rock we also saw 7 spotted eagle rays swimming in a V formation - that was a sight to behold.

We crossed the equator one year to the moment that Kai was born! His turning one meant that he also had vaccinations due and I’m very pleased to report that it was an absolutely breeze to get them on the island of San Cristobal where we made landfall - thank you to Government of Equador!

Our crew for this crossing is Luc, Sarah, Kai, Sarah’s Dad David (current playing chess via VHF with Jens of GarliX!), Dave Lowe (married to Sarah’s first cousin Emma who will join us for 3 weeks on the other side) and Dave’s sailor friend Oliver. We are delighted with our new crew - perhaps they’ll do guest blogs for us at some point :)

We got the Spinnaker just a few minutes after the start of this leg and kept it up until we dropped it under moon light after dinner. It was fun to see some other “kites” flying also - it is nice to see all the colors that people chose for these huge light wind sails. We have our gennacker up now but we’ve also done some motoring in an effort to get to where we hope the wind is. We’ve ran from and avoided squalls and since we got outside of the park boundary Luc has been dragging lines but the fish seem to know better here. We did have a fishing boat come by - it wanted to attach to us and had 2 large sharks aboard - the 2 guys aboard were asking for cigarettes and food! We all saw 3 whales and some of the guys have since 3 more since. We still have birds around us, especially those that like to play in the green of our portside navigation light at night.

In other misc news we had a rain shower before lunch and the most audile yet chat on the SSB radio with the rest of the fleet. Given the quality we gave out a puzzle for people to chew on and perhaps we’ll give a few more as the days go on.

Well we have 2800 nm to go … To date our longest trip on Makena is the 2203nm we did between Cape Verde and St Lucia as part of the ARC+. 





  



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