Karl & Kara Go Sailing

  Sunday April 16 th , Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos, Ecuador. We're in the Galápagos! We've had a couple of weeks here now being all touristy and doing lots of tourism and touring and going on tours. So the big question: was it worth all the paperwork and the hassle and the money and the stress? Well it really is very good. Very, very good. Just don't tell all the sailors who opted to go straight to French Polynesia (Silver Chief – you haven't missed anything at all, just stop reading now). So back in the middle of March, after soaking up some big city life, morning runs along the causeway and evening cycles to the microbrewery (and a Paddy's Day green beer) we finally got our window to leave Panamá. We joined all the other boats in the anchorage in the most popular activity of the moment: frantic hull-cleaning efforts to make sure we were as clean as possible for arrival in the very, very fussy Galápagos. The Aussie fleet all grabbed the...

  Tuesday 7 th March, Amador, Panama City. Still in Panamá! Oh yes indeedy, still here. But we're on the Pacific side now, yay. You know what that means....we made it through the Canal!!! So because we're very excited about that (well, Karl and I are, Gráinne's a bit more blasé having been there done that twice before) I'm going to inflict a Panama Canal blog entry on you. So after all our prepping and cleaning and fixing and paperworking and waiting around for parts-ing we finally decided we were ready for the transit and got in touch with our agent, Stan the Man, to let him know we were rearing to go anytime he could get us a slot. So he got us a slot. A week and a half away. Sigh. Might as well have been years. So we did a bit more local exploring, cycles through the forest, picnics at Fort Lorenzo, incursions into Fort Sherman and that sort of thing. Actually the Aeronaval suddenly started doing some exercises that involved a lot of shooting, machine gun takatak...