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American Spirit II - Day 39; Closing on Galapagos; Tuesday, February 11, 2014



At 5:00 AM a loud alarm sounded on the boat. The alarm was a "Position Lost" alarm. Even though we have a plethora of satellites tracking us and giving us our GPS position, this anomaly keeps popping up every few days. Aggravating when its in the middle of the night. My 'sleeping' hours are 12:00 AM - 6:00 AM, so losing an hour of sleep is costly.

On watch at 6:00 AM. Cloudy, wind 14 knots on port bow. Boat speed 6.3 knots. Motor sailing. If or when the wind goes more east, then we can sail. Being in the Doldrums, we keep getting rain showers passing by. No direct hits yet, though. All of us on board are 'bone tire.' Because of this, I called Saphire and advised them that we would not be participating in the 9:00 AM Radio Net with the other boats today.

A large Ecuadorian fishing boat, pulling 6 skiffs, passed under our stern about 300 yards away, at 10:45 AM. For a while I didn't know if they were going to be a problem or not. We were on a slowly closing collision course until they decided to change course. No radio communications.

When we did an inspection of our spinnaker halyards, we found that the one we used for a day and a half when we left the Las Perlas Islands, had a worn area on it. We had to cut the halyard and re tie it so it wouldn't fail at an inopportune moment. When we get to Galapagos, Joel will go up the mast to see if a shiv is wearing on the line. 'Up the mast' means being pulled up a halyard 58 feet above the water line. For those of you in Rio Linda, that's 6 stories up!

At 6:00 PM 20 birds like the one that Joel saved, started circling the boat, looking for fish that our wake and bow wave may make visible. They circled the boat, then landed in the water forward. As we got close to them, they took off and again circled the boat. Obviously, these are birds from the Galapagos.

Our water maker started acting up today. Instead of making 5 - 7 gallons of water per hour as it normally does, it was making .1 GPH (Gallons per hour). Not good. After checking pumps, looking at the 5 micron and 20 micron filters, hoses, reading the manual and calling the distributor in Tampa (no answer), we finally decided that the culprit might be air bubbles under the boat caused when the boat is tilted. (And we're tilted a lot, being a sail boat). Any way, after playing with the system for a couple of hours, we got water production back up to over 5 gallons per hour. Acceptable.

One of the biggest surprises of this trip so far to me is the number of items that have malfunctioned or broken so far. And not just on our boat. It seems like many or even most of the boats are having similar problems. Like the battery problem we had that necessitated us to go to Key West to get 2 new large boat batteries, we know of 2 other boats that had similar problems. Power consumption and battery charging are the life blood of sailing. If you can't charge your batteries properly, then you can't sail around the world. (You can, but just not as easily).

Brian Fox


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