Footnotes from Water Music

Position: 01 16'994 S 091 16'586W

After 10 interesting days in the Galapagos we left at 12.15 today shortly followed by Dream Catcher, a Canadian 50ft cruising yacht, and Raffen a Norwegian 54ft rather racy monohull. As we are the smallest at least we got a head start! Isabela was easily the most spectacular and beautiful of the islands. We had a fantastic boat trip which included snorkeling with giant Pacific green turtles and white tipped reef sharks and were lucky enough even to see a seahorse which was probably 8" long. We also did a 10 mile walk around the volcanic crater which was like walking on the moon and then on Mars where the black lava was tinged with red iron and white and yellow sulphur making amazing colours. The downside was that it was 3,000 ft up in the clouds and it was extremely wet! We are now 4 hours into our first day with the spinnaker up (Stephen and Brian both snoozing in their bunks) - the wind just aft of the beam with 12 knots of breeze and doing over 7 knots. We had a disaster following the shrink wrapping of the vegetables - they don't appear to like being shrink wrapped in this heat and gave of gasses and broke their seals and rotted and have now been chucked,luckily this morning we managed to restock and will not starve over the 3,000 miles! Gabrielle however is now a dab hand at the vacuum packer - but her enthusiasm shrink wrapping has had to be restricted to meat and fish only! The fishing lines are out but nothing caught as yet - looks like it will be pork chops for supper!

A happy crew - Stephen, Grace, Gabrielle and Brian