Past Galapagos!

We are now at 2 degrees South of the Equator, past the Galapagos Islands after 7 days of excellent sailing!

Moonwalker has once again proven herself as an amazing boat in light winds, although we had good strong northelies to start with from the Perlas Islands. Probably we got the last northerly blow of the season which was a lucky strike but by heading south and staying in the eastern side of Malpelo Island we managed to stay with a favorable current between 1 to 1.5 knots all the way past the Malpelo Island when we started to get some current against.

So we made such good time and used so little fuel, plus had some rain in the ITCZ area (which was remarkably small where we crossed her, lasting not much more than a day), that a stop in Galapagos seemed unnecessary. We are in such a good rhythm already, that stopping would mean starting all over again and it takes at least 3 days until the girls onboard find their good sea legs.

Our plan now is to head to the Gambier Islands just to make something a bit different, and seems like we have a good forecast to heading that way as we have fairly light winds still with a more easterly direction as we go further south. At the moment we got about 12 knots out of the SSE. The sailing has been superb to say the least.

Crossing the Equator for the last time was a bit of a non event onboard as it was in the middle of the night, but we had a special lunch and did our offers to our beloved Iemanja ( the Goddess of Waters in Afro-Brazilian culture). Our little statue of her was perfumed, fed with raisins, a shot of rum and some sparkling hair clips where applied to her clothing. After a few prayers of thanks and lots of caressing from all of us She seemed pleased as the next day, once the rum had evaporated, we caught a massive yellow fin tuna! The gigantic fish was about Brisa's length and easily 20 kgs. Our biggest fish by far.

All going well we should be in the Gambiers before the 20th of the month... long long way....

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