On the tenth day out Ted and I tackled a navigation problem that had been baffling us for several days. Obviously we weren’t making all the distance we were sailing. In the past two days, for instance, we were 62 miles short of the spot where we estimated we should be. We knew there was an adverse current in this region, but the loss seemed excessive. Ted and I set to work studying charts and books, and found a clue in a footnote of our Ocean Passages. It mentions “The Holy Child Current, which runs from January to March, but is not equally definite in all years.” It certainly seemed to be definite this year, and our position on the chart was right on the dotted line that represented this inconstant current, called “El Niño” in the pilot books.
The weather was generally fair and the seas light, but we had one sudden blow which caught Barbara on the tiller. I had hesitated to give her a night watch, knowing it would not result, as she fondly hoped, in giving me more rest. Actually I had learned to snatch needed sleep at any hour, day or night, and in fact slept more soundly during the day, when the others were awake, than I did at night. But she wanted to try it, so we compromised, and I gave her an hour after supper, from 1900 to 2000, so that she could learn to judge weather conditions after dark.
It was during one of these evening watches that she gave me a call: “Squall coming!” She was absolutely right. It hit us at once, the wind changing in an instant from south to west, accompanied by heavy rain. We took down staysail and genoa and tacked to the south under mizzen, main, and foresail. For the first time Barbara had the experience of keeping the tiller during the passage of a “front” and was very proud, afterward, of “her squall.”
Two days later, another incident was worth recording:
Jan. 29. Terrific bubbling all about, like a giant kettle. Can hear it quite easily—like crossing Amazon Bight, but in Amazon bubbling was bigger and color brown.
On this same day I had the bad luck to break my reading glasses, the spares—having already lost the originals over the side—and faced the poor prospect of a long passage, with plenty of time for reading, and broken lenses. However, I patched them together with transparent tape, and became quite adept at reading through the chinks in the patches.
On February 1 we knew from the number of birds about that we were close to land. Our morning shots seemed to indicate that we were south of the island, so we edged a bit to the north. At 1123 Ted sighted land through the haze off the starboard bow, and soon we were rounding the southwest corner of San Cristóbal, keeping well out because of swells and the onshore current. We passed Freshwater Falls, on the south side of the island, where the old-time sailing ships were wont to water. On an exposed shore, with heavy surf and a square-rigger to handle, this must have been a feat that demanded real seamanship, not to mention plenty of nerve.
At 1900 we entered Wreck Bay. Coming up to the anchorage, we pulled in our log line and discovered that there were barnacles on it. If so many had attached themselves to us in two weeks, how many, we wondered, must have signed on with those ships that have drifted two or three months between Panama and the Galápagos!
Within half an hour we had been boarded and cleared by very efficient officers, and I had brought the log up to date and summarized the passage.
We had eagerly looked forward to our visit to the Galápagos, having read everything we could about the islands, from Darwin on. We had been intrigued by the accounts of the weird geological formations, of unique and strangely fearless animal life, of rugged individuals who had pioneered here. But too often the accounts that one reads are of a bygone era and do not accurately describe islands as they exist today. Now we would have a chance to see for ourselves.