Arriving in the Galapagos

We arrived in the Galapagos Islands this morning. I must admit, I hardly could imagine the day we would get here thinking back 2 weeks ago. We immediately came across some tourist dive boats, and then they directed our attention to a nearby national park patrol vessel…which was a bit of a disappointment to us really as we were hoping our presence would remain under wraps for at least a few days. But now it seems most likely that the navy will be notified of our presence, and now we are at their mercy to whether or not we can patrol for illegal fishing operations. We cruised past Wolf Island around 10:30 this morning and moved straight on to Darwin Island. When we got to Darwin, I was in charge of steering the ship on a path around the island up until the point a pod of dolphins started to bowride. Alex graciously relieved me of my duties and I ran up to the bow with the rest of the crew to watch the dolphins. I took quite a bit of footage of the dolphins and I’m hoping at least some of it turns out. It was amazing to see the dolphins cruising along at the bow. Some of them would occasionally roll over and look up at us all staring down at them. There were thousands of birds as well. While we were entranced with staring at the dolphins below, the birds were coming closer and closer over head. There were many times when a boobie was within 2 meters of us. I can’t get over the bravery, or maybe curiosity of these animals.

With an hour left of my watch, Alex stopped the ship and decided to start drifting. Since there wasn’t much to do in the bridge and he wanted to stay on watch anyways, he let me off to go swimming. Yesterday I went swimming as part of the equator iniation routine, and today I got to jump in as well. The water was so nice; warm, refreshing and amazingly blue. The only downfall was that there were quite a few jellyfish in the water and I got stung quite a few times. I hardly could care. It had been so long since I had been in the water swimming properly, and so long since I had really had any form of exercise, I loved every minute of it. Once I was too tired to stay in, I got out to dry off in the sun. Once I was dry and recovered, I realized just how still the ship was, and I had my first yoga session in over a month. I went up to the helideck with my yoga mat, and although the ship still rolled a bit and balancing asanas were a bit difficult, I was quite happy to move through a few sun salutations as the sun was setting. Dinner followed, with a few beers in the bosun’s locker (no drinking on deck since we’re in the park) and then I laid out enjoying the amazing night sky. The clouds were out, but hardly so and in between sips of the stars Julie and I could hear dolphins clicking near the ship. We never saw the dolphins, but we did see lots and lots of bioluminescence. It’s been a pretty magical day and I’m so happy to be here. It’s the first time in a long time that I can say that there is no place else I’d rather be right now.