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I agreed, peering out into the dark night as I stood leaning out from the stays. Every time
Déjà vu rose and heeled to a wave, it felt as though she was riding up on a reef. Every white
breaking sea was a reef exposed and snapping at her keel. My nerves became taut, and I
felt panicky. I had to come to a snappy decision. We could not comfortably sail any further
in the dark. This was insanity. I really didn't know where we were, and any moment now
we could founder on a rock.
“No! That's it. We are not going to stay here another minute. Fuck Las Perlas; fuck the
good fishing, and fuck the interesting little islands, I don't like this at all. My sixth sense
tells me to get the hell out of here. Let's come about and head back the way we came for
a few hours, and then reset our course that will ensure the safest direction away from this
God forsaken place!”
It was my fault for allowing us to arrive at an island or landfall that was unknown to us
especially in the dark. I had just broken one of my golden rules and cursed myself for being
so slack. That was how boats get wrecked and people got lost. I really needed to be more
responsible and act more like a skipper.
We thankfully came about and reset the sails. We were now on a starboard tack heading
west-northwest. While this may have been slightly counter to our destination to the Galapa-
gos group, I didn't mind the extra hours in light of the safety aspect at stake.
By midnight, the moon had risen high enough to see around us, and the sea looked natural
and open once again. Déjà vu was sailing happily now and wasn't being gripped by cur-
rents, imaginary or otherwise. I could always tell when she was not performing her best;
she would tell me. I knew that if I was to go down below and press my ear up to the mast
partner, the mens' choir voices would be agreeing with my decision.
We had covered about twenty sea miles since the scare, and it felt safe now to readjust our
course again and head directly for the Galapagos Islands. Swinging through west to south-
west we put Déjà vu's sails asleep on a fairly broad reach in the northerly breeze and, with
a sigh of relief, continued on. We had been lucky again. Poseidon was smiling up at us.
In the early hours of the following morning we caught a huge Bonita fish, which had been
dragging behind for how long we didn't know. It was gutted, filleted, and put away for
cooking later in the day. The trade wind started to weaken slightly the further south we
headed. We were sailing towards the equator, the doldrums for want of a more realistic
word, and we knew we would lose a lot of our wind.
I had started reading the epic novel of Irving Stone's life story of Charles Darwin,
The Ori-
gin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin
, and the trip to the Galapagos was the perfect
setting. I couldn't wait to see the islands that he had sailed through on the HMS Beagle
