BOOBIES!!

Boobies!

BOOBIES

The intrepid pair are sitting on the back end of the boat in the shade when all of a sudden there is a loud SPLOOSHSPLAT. Looking behind them they see ripples spreading out from a central focus and what seems like ages later there is a plop as up pops a bird. These are the amazing boobies. They fly about high overhead and then make a kamikaze dive into the water – we never see if they get anything – and then up they come, shake themselves a bit, and the flap flap with the wings and flap flap with their big blue feet and they are airborne for another go. And they really do have bright blue beaks and bright blue feet. What we don’t understand is how they don’t knock themselves out when they hit the water at the speed they do.

NOT GOOD NEWS

And now the batteries. The electrics on the boat are very much Dave’s baby as he has put a lot of effort into making up a good system. I had heard him talk about the batteries as being super dooper ones and all seemed OK. He looks at them regularly and tops them up and they seem to provide power when we need it so they tend to be taken for granted. So the day came to give them a once over and shock horror, they are not very well at all. Something had seemed to be not quite right for some time though, as we had been charging the batteries with the engine for longer and longer times each day, but it creeps up on you. After getting them out of their cubby holes, which is not easy, the truth dawned – we need new ones. Here, in Galapagos, the back of nowhere!  Dave has salvaged a couple and we can make do overnight, but no way can we set off for over a month at sea with things as they are.

So we started at one end of the town, going from one shop to the next one suggested, until we came to a shop full of cleaning products, but with a sign outside that said ‘battery agent’. It did not look promising at all, but in we went, and found a lass who could speak a bit of English. Over the next few days we were in touch with her boss who was in Ecuador at the time on a re-supply mission, and with a great deal of effort on his part it appears he has been able to find what we need at last. It did look hopeless at first and Dave was getting most despondent, thinking we might have to risk using truck batteries with much less capacity than we need just to get us to Tahiti, with the risk that they would not last the distance given the demands that would be put on them. So now it is off to the cash machines to start the money drain to pay for them, and we wait for the next supply ship and their arrival in a week's time.

It would appear we should never stop anywhere – whenever we stop we seem to find a problem!

STOP PRESS

Dave has refused to consider doing anything other than the British thing of shout louder in another language. He has just come back proud of his purchase of a can of fly spray – except it is lavender air freshener.

‘I went, “shhh shhh“ and made aerosol can signs,’ he said. ‘What more can you want?’