GHOST

Since before we even set off on the trip, we planned to swim across the equator, envisaging a becalmed boat, beautiful clear blue water surrounding us and the much reported calm weather. Of course as a wise man once said (Stu) all plans are subject to change! The reality was in fact that we ended up crossing at 1.30am in complete darkness with not even the moon out (in fact there had been some discussion that the Russians had stolen the moon as we had seen no evidence of it at all the whole trip from Las Perlas!). In addition the boat was cruising along quite happily at 4.5 knots and with the pitch black water being completely unappealing the whole swimming idea was definitely abandoned.

I was on the midnight to 3am watch so as we approached the zero degree latitude line I woke up the rest of the crew and they groggily got ready to party, with chilled Don Simon (sangria) and a few props I'd bought in Panama to celebrate. Traditions seem to vary and our take on the big event was to dress Brad up in a jesters hat and trident and offer some beer to Neptune. OK so it wasn't that fancy but it was 1.30am!

The rest of the trip to Galapagos was good, we had the gennaker out for most of the sixth day cruising along nicely and the wind didn't fail until later that final night, but we had wanted to give the batteries a good charge anyway and run the watermaker for a while to finish the trip with full water tanks so it suited us to motor anyway. We definitely can't complain about the motoring though since we actually only had the donk on for less than 2 days and used 130 litres of fuel (vs the total 440 litres we thought we might get through, and anyway at $3.10 per gallon here the price is not as bad as we expected).

Slightly worrying though - our alternator seems to be playing up and the beer fridge fan is not working (aaaagh), particularly inconvenient for them both the fail here but we'll see what we can do.

More on Galapagos to come in next blog but how often do sealions get in the way of anchoring????