When I am writing this I have this amazing “writing-personal-history” feeling inside me! A couple of days ago I could overlook the Panama Canal from our onboard breakfast table and now I drinking my breakfast coffee overlooking Isla Cristobal in fu…. Galapagos islands!!!! It´s a tough life- isn’t it?
We decided to do a fast stop at Isla Malpelo (The Shark island) on our way to Galapagos. We knew all the time that it was a bit of a gambling to plan a stop there. Malpelo is a UNESCO Colombian natural reserve park in the middle of nowhere that is being watched over by the colombian military!
To make a legal stop here you will have to apply for all sorts of permissions and papers months before your arrival! We didn’t have any paperworks what so ever, but what we did have was a “broken” propeller and that gave us a 24 hours pass to stay in their waters. We were not allowed to step foot on the island but we were allowed to stay on one of their two moorings.
The island was amazing, a big impressive rock rising straight up from the water! No trees, no grass, no nothing! Just a big dramatic Jurassic-park-look-a-like-rock with caves, birds and a lot of hammerhead sharks swimming around it! The water was full of plankton and offered really bad visibility which makes “shark-diving” even more scary than usual. Katrin that is our onboard shark expert claims we have nothOing to fear of the sharks but Davide and me who actually have a lot of respect for these big “meat-eating- high-speed-super-predators” did not really appreciate the bad visibility. We did a couple of dives and even though we couldn’t see more than 8 meters in front of us we spotted hammerhead sharks on every dive we did!
We were moored inside a small bay and had 3 divers in the water when the wind suddenly picked up and made our stay on the island very unpleasant. Bay Dreamer was rocking hard inside the small bay and as soon as the divers were back on the boat we raised our sails and continued towards our next destination- the Galapagos!
Three days after we left the “rock” we got a serious fish on one of our fishing rods! We couldn’t really agree on how heavy this SWORD-FISH was but the onboard bids are between 60 and 80 kilo! It took us over 30 minutes to reel him in and when we saw the size of this beautiful animal we decided to release him back into the blue. Davide did his normal super-hero move and cut the hook loose with a “power-cutter”. Only Vera doesn’t really understand the concept of “catch and release” and was not happy at all to eat rice leftovers later on that night!
On the 11th of march at 14.00 we popped the champagne and did the obligatory equator swim! Everyone was in the water- even Vera (our dog) went for an equator -swim- a forced one, but still a swim! I always get stunned when the sea is as still as it was during our equator crossing; No waves, no swell, no breeze just totally quiet and still!
Bay Dreamer did good on this leg. The only problem that we experienced was with our water maker that stopped producing water. We are prepared for this type of problems and we carry a large amount of drinking water so we would manage without it! even though it is giving us a large dose of quality of life! After 13 hours of taking apart things you should not take apart we managed to get her running again! It was the electric pump that needed some love and cleaning. How we managed to get it back together again is still a big mystery!
//Daniel
Men hur härligt får man ha d??? Lite avis e man ju. Inte på själva överlevnadsmomentet utan vädret å er närvaro 😉 saknar er som tusan!