Day 53: Galapagos – 27/02/10

What a day.  I am lying vaguely awake, about to drift off to sleep when I hear the bleep on the satellite phone telling me there is an incoming message.  I figure it can wait until it is light so I turn over and try to get back to sleep.  I am on the edge of sleep when we hear a furious hammering on the side of the boat.  My first thought is that we have drifted but I am aware that I cannot hear the anchor alarm so it can’t be that.  Mike leaps out of bed and out into the cockpit.  It is Wolfgang from our sister ship, Destiny, saying that there is a tsunami warning due to an earthquake in Chile.  It’s 5 am.

By this time we are all up, and over the VHF come messages from rally control saying that the earthquake has been recorded at 8.8 on the Richter scale and tsunami warnings are in place all up the coast.  Looking at the message from Johanne on the satellite phone, this confirms it. 

Mike knows that the safest place for a boat to be in a tsunami is in deep water so he decides to pull the anchor up and get out of the anchorage, and looking around, other boats are doing the same thing.  Getting the bow anchor up is no problem but getting the stern one up necessitates getting the dinghy down and hauling it up manually into the dinghy, not an easy process when it’s dug in as deep as ours is.  In the end Jim writes the boat name on a fender and Mike ties this to the anchor rope and we dump it in order to get away quickly.

We head out to deep water, life jackets on, and I secure everything on the boat just in case.  Within an hour we are in the deepest water around (it would take another 6 hours to get to water any deeper) and we cut the engines back so that we are just bobbing around at 2 knots facing the direction in which the tsunami is predicted to arrive.  Then we have a cup of tea and wait – there’s nothing else we can do.  Looking at the sun rising, it’s hard to imagine that something nasty could be on its way.

It is predicted to reach the Galapagos at approximately 7.13 am and to be 1.3 metres from the middle of the wave to the top.  The arrival times are usually pretty accurate because they know how quickly these things travel, but predicting height is much harder.  The time comes and goes.  Sure, there are some waves, but nothing big, so it looks like it is a false alarm.  We hang around anyway although we see some boats turn around and head back.  Mike decides to wait a bit longer as it will do no harm and he doesn’t want to be milling around trying to anchor when lots of other boats are doing the same.

Just after 8 am there is an announcement from rally control that the Port Authority has closed the port as there have been sea surges.  , so it will remain closed until 9.30 am.  Just before that time it is announced that is is still closed due to unusual sea conditions and we should remain outside the port until further notice.  Apparently the sea was sucked out of the bay, reducing the level by one metre then pulled it back in taking it up a further two metres, all within the space of a couple of minutes.  It ends up being around 11 am before the boats are let back in, and again, Mike holds back, waiting to see what the other boats find before he ventures in.  It’s not long before we hear from them.  Graham on Eowyn, reports that there are really strange swirling currents and constant fluctuations of sea levels of a metre or so.  Mike, who at this time had started to head in slowly, immediately turns the boat around and heads out again.  We decide to wait a little longer and have lunch at sea.

Jim is looking very attractive with his arm supported in a sling made from one of my sarongs.  I chose a pretty blue one to go with his eyes and hair although I’m not sure he appreciated my styling!  It does make his arm more comfortable though, as he did give it a pretty good wrench yesterday.

After lunch we go back in.  We had hoped to go back to the spot we had originally occupied and reattach ourselves to our stern anchor but another boat has put themselves there, and to our dismay, there is no sign of the fender we left attached to the anchor.

Maggie and Bob from Ocean Jasper are in their dinghy and offer to assist us retrieve our stern anchor and redeploy it but with no fender attached, the rope has sunk and it will take a dive to retrieve it.  They motor around the bay to see if it has come detached and is by the shore but there is no sign of it.  It was a nice fender, and it is obvious that someone has stolen it – we are not the only boat this has happened to today – there are always opportunists around.  Bastards!

With no stern anchor, and the strange currents and surges, Mike puts Jeannius way over on the edge of the anchorage, so that we will not swing and hit anyone who is tied to bow and stern anchors.  He then goes off with Maggie and Bob in their dinghy to dive for the anchor.  When he gets to where he left it, there is another diver in full gear who tells him not to waste his time – the sea is so churned up there is no visibility and you can’t see more than a foot in front.  Jared, from Brown Eyed Girl says he will come and dive with Mike tomorrow or whenever the visibility improves.

He goes off round the bay and sees the damage that has happened to two of the rally boats that were left in the anchorage next to each other.  Although they both had stern and bow anchors, the surges and currently swung them round and they hit each other, one sustaining a lot more damage than the other.  The owners were not on the boat and were awaiting repairs to their engines which were not functioning so even if they had been there, they could not have moved the boat out of the bay.  What a nasty surprise they will have when they come back.

Mike goes onto another catamaran to help them moor up then comes back to Jeannius to monitor our movements.  All of a sudden the water depth drops by two metres, leaving us with almost nothing under the keel then shoots back up to the original depth, all in less than three minutes and the boat swings around by 180 degrees before returning back to its original position.  Over the radio comes reports of aftershocks from the Chile quake which is probably what is causing this.

For the rest of the afternoon, all is calm, until darkness falls, then the strange surging and swinging starts again (the sea levels plummet and rise from twelve feet down to six feet and back again in minutes) and Mike decides that we need to have an anchor watch tonight ie one of us will stay up to monitor the sea levels (particularly during low tide) and to ensure that the boat returns to its correct resting position after each manic swing, and does not pull its anchor out which it is in danger of doing if we happen to go a full 360 degrees.

We see Brown Eyed Girl lift her anchor and move further out, Joe later coming on the radio to confirm that he had to do this as he had started to hit the bottom.  The sea depth where he had anchored had started off at sixteen feet!

He takes the first watch, from 9 until 12 as this is when low tide is and when we are in the most danger of hitting the bottom.  I am to take the second watch.  I go to bed and it takes quite a while to get to sleep as I keep listening for ominous sounds.