2021 Life Logs, Day 72: Writing, Writing, and Writing
Date: Saturday, March 13, 2021
Weather: Sunny and Windy; High 47, Low, 33 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
It was a sunny day, but when I went out to take Shadow for a late morning walk, I wanted to turn around and go back inside. The wind was blowing and it felt freezing to me. We completed only half our normal walk and saved the other half for later in the afternoon when I would wear something warmer. Those two walks and two short phone calls were the extent of my day other than my writing, writing, and writing. Oh, I also took an hour break late afternoon to watch the IMAX video on the Galapagos. Yes, I am still in the Galapagos, but should be on my way to French Polynesia by Monday. And I have a correction to make. Last Monday I wrote in my log that we spent 30 days in the Galapagos, but today I realized it was 38 days. We had a six-week permit and because of another transmission issue, we almost stayed the entire time. When we arrived in the Galapagos, the anchorage was filled with world cruisers. By the time we left on the 22nd of April, there was only one other sailboat in the anchorage, and they followed us out. There was a reason people had moved on and that was because you have to go all the way across the South Pacific and get south to New Zealand, north to the Marshall Islands, or to Queensland in Australia before the cyclone season begins in November. You have to keep moving because, depending on your final destination, there are about 7,000 to 8,000 miles of ocean and beautiful islands to see in a very few months.
I stopped to watch the Galapagos video because I was writing about our experience exploring the Sierra Negra volcano on Isabella Island. That day rates in my top experiences of all the things we did around the world. Heather and Jed had flown to the Galapagos to tour with us and we were anchored off Isabella Island. We had read that if went to the café on the main dirt street in the town of Puerto Villamil, the owner would arrange a tour of the volcano for you. We did that and by chance our tour guide was a young man, probably in his forties, named Mathias Espinosa. What a piece of luck that was! He was a fabulous guide. His father was a geology professor in Quito in mainland Ecuador and Mathias had grown up with a geologist’s appreciation of the earth. I read online today, “When Mathias came to the Galapagos in the late 80’s, he fell in love with the raw and untouched beauty of the Enchanted Islands and decided to make the Galapagos his life’s work and passion.” By the time we met him in 2006, he had probably been in the islands for twenty years. He was a dive master and had made a living doing that on Santa Cruz Island which is the tourist hub until he ‘retired’ to Isabella where we met him. He told us he was working with the BBC on a movie about the Galapagos, but he did not tell us he had been the featured naturalist guide in a 1999 IMAX film on the islands. All of that experience was wrapped into one person and we were the recipients of his vast knowledge. And that was just one day of the thirty-eight days we spent in the Galapagos. I have struggled to compress all of the experiences there into one chapter of The Voyage of Windbird. But I am hopeful that I will finish that chapter tomorrow.
