As we expected, we arrived in Galapagos Sunday morning. While the last couple of days we've had occasional tastes of the trade winds, they have each time switched back into unfavorable winds that we then had to tack into.

Saturday afternoon, Mark noticed a fin swimming alongside the boat. Before we knew it, there appeared a whole pod of dolphins swimming along both sides of the Northfork. Some smaller groups of them were swimming synchronized together and occasionally one would take a leap out of the water. Dana got quite excited because she had been looking forward to dolphins, which we hadn't really seen much of so far on our trip, and this was a real show they were giving us. We went to the bow of the boat and watched them on both sides for about 15 minutes (the autopilot was taking care of the boat during this time), at which point the whole lot of them jetted off to starboard.

Dana noticed that there was a string tangled up in the front of the boat. Mark
went up and disentangled line, figuring out it was leech line for the genoa. This is a thin line that mostly runs up a sleeve in the leech of the sail and is used to help trim the tail so that the sail will not vibrate too much, which slows the boat down and adds wear to the sail from all the movement. It had broken and come out of the slot. Initially, we thought we might need to swap our genoas but with some work we were able to trim the sail so it wouldn't vibrate, even without the line. Luckily, we have some spare line that had been purchased for when the same line on our mainsail had broken (though at that time we had been able to reuse the existing line).

We've had a number of items break on this leg of our trip and we'll have a day or so in the Galapagos where we'll be attending to these issues. Some of the other items are: The elastic line that keeps the tension on the main topping lift (we've had to adjust this by hand until we figure out a replacement). The plumbing for the rear head is still not repaired and needs to be cleaned and then we need to start regularly flushing diluted muriatic (aka hydrochloric) acid to break down calcium build up that occurs because of the use of salt water. Then there are some other fixes we need to do with parts we brought back with us from the US, such as replacing the rotary autopilot drive unit, replace the not-exactly correct AC fuse for our generator, and repair the
swtiches for our windlass. Plus tons of other things. The hope is we'll have plenty of time to take care of this on our crossing to the Marquesas, if the winds and seas are smooth enough.

Other things we have been up to include trying to get our boat organized. Dana made some zuchini bread today before our zuchini goes bad. Mark has been working on finishing the job of scanning all of our manuals; the idea is to have online copies of all our key documents and information so we we can free up shelf space by putting the paper copies in less convenient spots on the boat. Mark also used some of his big-boy computer skills to work around the problem that he bought one of the iPads that does not have GPS built-in.... he figured a way to use the GPS from one of the laptops. This has been a problem, since we bought a set of Pacific maps for the iPad and, other than the lack of GPS, the iPad/iNavx combination seems just about perfect for doing passage planning.

We anchored in Acadamia Bay. It is a bit crowded and the area is subject to wind shifts so all the boats have an extra anchor off their stern. After getting that set up, we took a taxi into town and promptly had a beer in one of the restaurants to celebrate getting here.