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Showing posts with the label Galapagos

The Enchanted Islands

For those of you who aren’t sailors, imagine trying to walk forward while someone is pushing you sideways. That's kind of what we're dealing with. Since turning the corner off the coast of Ecuador, we’ve been battling a combination of strong current and headwinds. The current is pushing us directly away from the Galapagos, while the wind is coming from slightly further south. Sailing directly into the wind isn’t an option, so we have to tack back and forth every 12 hrs or so. Normally, we’d tack around 100 degrees as we would be sailing 45 degrees from the wind and allowing a little bit for some current, but the current is so strong and pushing us so far sideways that we're tacking through about 155 degrees. This means that on one tack, we're actually sailing away from our destination, while on the other, we make some progress but at a snail's pace – around 100 nautical miles a day. And if we keep going in the "good" direction, that 100 miles quickly becom...