For starters you can’t just leave somewhere like the galapagos.  You must first notify Regine 2 days in advance who notifies our agent Ricardo who sorts it all out with someone else… who gives Ricardo a piece of paper to give to Regine who passes it on to us to say we can leave. Few!  Regine has to do this for 30 boats… and that was just for leaving.  I don’t even want to think about entering!

She must be some kind of wizard because we all manage to get our zarpes  ( leaving tickets) and with a little ( alot) of help from Gav we manage to get the boat ready and fit for the 3000 mile passage that awaits us.

Provisioning for such a passage would be tricky anywhere but there’s no 24 hour big tescos here so have to order our food through another agent who gets it flown in from Equador and delivered to the boat.. which sounds like a glammed up tesco’s delivery until you realise they’ve given you all the nearly out of date stuff and shitty looking fruit and really it’s just like a tesco’s delivery.  A few hours wandering around the fruit market later and our fruit issues solved, we were not to rest just yet as a rogue taxi driver decided to ram our dingy with his flag pole.  Standing on Safiya’s dingy in a swelly ancourage while trying to patch a large hole is not easy… And sadly didn’t work.  Luckily the magical Regine kicked Ricardo’s ass in to gear once again and found us a dingy repair man.  It unfortunately meant we set off 6 hours later than we’d planned but that’s sailing!

Leaving the galapagos and friends behind was not easy.  Especially knowing we wouldn’t see some for a long time and others for a really long time.  And yet again I come to the conclusion that saying good byes is the hardest part of Sailing. I can deal with broken dingys,  leaking engines,  squalls and late night shifts but saying goodbyes won’t ever get easier.

However, as I sit on watch writing this the sun is about to come up and I’m full up on chocolate biscuits trying to work out which saw doctors song was their “one hit wonder” so It’s not all bad.  And I am very much looking forward to the marquesas where we will be reunited with the fleet and internet coverage so we can be reunited with loved ones back home.