We left Puertos Ayore Sunday and sailed west toward Isabella. We had heard from Chris on Moonshine several days earlier and hoped to meet up with him today and perhaps see the town. However, we had been unable to reach Chris since. As we approached Isabella he attempted to hail Chris on VHF 16 but no luck. He had said he would be heading out Sunday, so perhaps he was already underway. Hopefully, we'll reach him on SailMail or the SSB.

The Galapagos were ok. The biggest problem is that they prevent sailboats from exploring the islands; we were limited to only 2 ports we could anchor in. The port we were in, Ayore, was very crowded and bumpy from a surge. The only way we could visit other islands was through day trips, which involved long boat rides on jenky boats and fairly week guided tours. We'd spend 4-6 hours of the day getting to the other island and only have 3-4 hours for the tour and a gnarly meal of some kind. As these tours were by no means cheap, this led to not a great sense of satisfaction with the Galapagos. We went on Monday to Floreana and Tuesday to Bartolemy.

Our other days were spent carrying out repairs and outfitting the Northfork. Mark spent several days getting the aft head to flush. The exit line had been blocked since the night before leaving Panama. Apparently, the sea water had calcified the tubing and progressively blocked the pipe. Mark had to disassemble the plumbing and then try to ream out the calcified muckiness while trying to keep the head from getting too dirty. Part of the frustrations was that the plumbing had been blocked in several places and Mark in his impatience had tried several time to reassemble things and test the head out, unsuccessfully each time. At any rate, on the 3rd try, Mark was able to get the head to finally flush properly. Then we ran a solution of 10% muriatic acid in the line to dissolve the rest of the calcification, hopefully avoiding the problem from recurring again.

Mark also installed our repaired rotary autopilot drive unit which we had brought back from the US. We replaced our ballooner halyard with the one Amel had sent us. Mark replaced the switches on our windlass and the gasket used to seal the windlass from seawater. And carried out some other minor repairs.

Part of the reason we got out 2 days later than we had hoped was that a water taxi we had agreed to have fill our diesel tanks on thursday failed to show up. We realized too late that getting diesel from water taxis is an iffy matter. The issue is that Ecuador heavily subsidizes diesel for its citizens, selling it for $1/gal where it would otherwise be $3-4/gal. Foreigners are not allowed to avail themselves to these prices. The water taxis attempt to bypass these rules and provide the diesel at lower prices, pocketing the difference between the subsidized price they pay and the $2-3 they sell it for. They do this rather than what is supposed to be done, which is to file some paperwork with the harbor master to get a license to sell a specific amount of fuel to a boat, a process that takes 2 days. At any rate, the taxi we had agreed to fill our jerry cans with wanted to come by a 8:30pm under cover of darkness, but didn't show up. As we needed to fill up as much as possible on diesel, we were stuck waiting 2 days for our "agent" to handle it for us. We finally got our diesel saturday afternoon.

We finally pulled up our anchor Sunday morning and made our way out of the port, happy to be on our way. We've been making a good 6- 9kts with a southerly wind on our beam, with almost no heeling.

Our water tanks were almost empty. As soon as we could get far enough out to see to run our water maker, we fired it up to load up on water. We were disappointed after a couple of hours to have the generator die on us. Mark investigated and found the raw water impeller had fallen apart. This was keeping sea water from cooling the generator, so it had overheated and the sensor had killed the generator. Mark spent a couple of hours replacing the impeller and then opening up the heat exchange unit to pull out the pieces of the old impeller that were sticking up the holes in the exchange's tubes. The repair went well and the generator is working properly again.