The Truth About Sailing . . .

33 days at sea. 33 days learning to sail. 33 days of day watches. 33 days of being woken in the middle of the night to do 2 hours of night watch. 33 days of rice and pasta. 33 days of lecture. 33 days of learning to sail. 33 days with 7 other people on a 45 foot yacht none of which have taken a proper shower since leaving land. What more is there to say?

Somewhere over 2500 nautical miles, I learned how to sail a boat - how to set the sails, put reefs, shake reefs, sheet the Genoa, winch, pull, steer a heading, read the clouds, predict the weather, read a map, plot a course, plan a voyage, bunker a boat, identify the lights on other vessels and how they are approaching, follow the laws of the sea (written and un), frighten pirates away, leave harbor, enter harbor, anchor, do laundry on the back of a boat, clean myself with 2 liters of water and a small bucket, cook in a healing kitchen, and loads of other useful things.

Every day was different, and yet there was a distinct pattern to every day.

9 am - music on the stereo - wake up time
930 am - breakfast (gross bread and jam with tea at first but after 10 days, oatmeal and tea)
945 am - skipper of the previous night does weather survey of night watches, skipper of the day makes weather prediction considering current conditions and decides how to set sails
10 am - update the log book
1015 - 1230 pm - usually some sort of navigation excercise and sail movements mixed with a litte spare time to wash or study
1230 pm - lunch (rice or pasta with some variation of sauce)
1 pm to 4 pm - more miscellaneous time to study, wash, work problems, etc. (2-4 is technically siesta time, so it´s silent time)
4pm-5pm - lecture
5pm - happy hour (a drink or two (until we ran out of everything 2 weeks from land) and popcorn while listening to everyone who loves to hear themselves talk compete for the award of the most intelligent
730 pm - dinner (more rice or pasta)
8 pm - night skipper predicts the night weather and decides how to set the sails, sail movement done if necessary, night briefing, more miscellaneous time
9 pm - bed time, go to your cabin
9 pm-10pm - for me, journal and reading

*Add in your personal duties of 2 hour watches every 12 hours (for example 3-5 pm and 5-7 am), circulating cooking and dish washing duties, personal washing, laundry, and miscellaneous random happenings (catching fish, spotting pirates, getting caught in a fishing net) - and you generally have each of 33 days.

It was a great experience. I learned alot. The company wasn´t great - but sometimes ok. The Captain was an arrogant, unethical creep. But, I really feel like I learned alot and got some good experienc. And, I´m looking forward to learning more once I get back to Chicago. I´m going to try to get involved with some racing.

For now, I decided to end my trip in Galapogas instead of spending another 10 days sailing to the mainland and taking this yachtmaster test. While, I´m pretty sure I would have passed the test, I would have never used the license and it was never my goal for going on this trip. I have the mileage and the experience - which is the important part. My decision was based on the fact that I have a very short amount of time left (as we are 2 weeks behind schedule) and I´d rather spend my last couple weeks before starting work, exploring Ecuador and relaxing.

I had a good time in San Cristobal. It is very untouched. The highlights were watching the sealions play on the beach, snorkeling-swimming with them in a crystal clear cove as they played very near (they even bit my friend´s fin playfully-that´s how close they got), and going to a beautiful, hidden beach with crystal clear waters and big waves to play in. I came over to another island yesterday - Santa Cruz. It´s the main tourist island. It´s quite nice. A bit bigger, a bit more expensive, but beautiful. I spent yesterday exploring the Darwin center, the tortoise reproduction center, and lying on the beach. Today I´m going to take a 2.5 meter hike to a beach that´s supposed to be amazing and have alot of wildlife. A bit more time on the islands and then off to the mainland.



Roff wrote and asked for more info on the pirate insidents, so I thought I'd post my response here as well.

Now about the pirates! I think that pirates are pretty common off the Peru coast for small vessels. This probably wouldn't be something that big ships would have to worry about. It's just fishermen along the Peruvian load line who dabble in pirating. We sailed along the load line for most of the trip, but we tried to keep our distance. We always had a 24 hour watch for ships going. There were a couple of instances of interest. One day we were caught in a fishing net. In order to get ourselves free, we had to cut the net. Thus, the fishermen lost their catch and their net. We had about an hour left of daylight in which we jibed and changed our track to try to make as much distance before the fishermen returned. That very night, because of the jibe, we were so close to the load line that we had alot of traffic. We sail black not to attract attention. But, inevidibly, a fishing boat noticed our presence and came over to investigate. Our Captain has his own little trick for this. He suddenly throws on a strobe light and blinds them with it. This simulates a military/police boat. When he did it in this instance, the fishermen got all excited - screaming to each other and hightailing it out of there quickly. They are afraid of the police as they are usually fishing illegally. In another instance, some Japanese fishermen came over to investigate us during the day. In this case the Captain had myself and the other girl go downstairs and had all the men get on deck as a form of intimidation. These fishermen also left. There were no weapons aboard the boat. So, if we were attacked by pirates, our defense would be to shoot flares at their gas tanks to blow them up. Very hollywood!!! Anyways, I think that's all we had on pirates. Nothing too big, but it was always something we were keeping an eye open for.