LEAVING THE LAS PERLAS ISLAND
We are sailing along at 8 knots, with a 13 knot wind blowing and flat seas; perfect conditions for our first night at sea. We left the Las Perlas islands this afternoon and hope to arrive in the Galapagos islands in about 7 days, subject of course to weather!!.
This stretch of water is known for very variable winds often none at all; no doubt we will have to motor for at least a couple of days. The knack is to try to preserve fuel as the Galapagos islands aren’t the cheapest for diesel and we will need to save quite a lot for the next leg of 3000 miles in case we are unable to sail.
We enjoyed our 3 days chill out in Las Perlas in company with Joule (Peter and Nani) our Australian cruising buddies. The contrast between islands is quite amazing. On one hand you have Isla Contadora, which reminds me a lot like the early Hamilton island – lots of upmarket houses, hotels and golf buggies. While Isla Pedro Gonzales , an island no more than 15 miles away, is a ram shackle group of shacks with most of the locals lazing about, more like a third world shanty town.
The third island we visited was uninhabited. We went ashore for a walk when the tide was out. We saw a track in the sand of a very large animal. It could only have been a monitor lizard or a crocodile. We didn’t hang around to find out.
Our last night in Las Perlas we decided to try our hand at fishing – it wasn’t long before both Penny and I hooked a couple of very large fish. Penny s’ fish stripped her line and mine just snapped it. A couple more attempts still didn’t bring us any joy and we were running out of tackle.
In the morning Penny was determined to find out what type of fish was there so I rigged up the big guns – my new beaut reel and rod with 30 kilo braking strain line. It wasn’t long before Penny got her first strike and after a great deal of hard work finally got the fish up to the surface only to find it was a huge string ray. Once we got the ray close to the boat we cut the line and let him go. We didn’t fancy getting him on board with his enormous tail flicking angrily. Didn’t fancy doing a ‘Steve Erwin’
