Sunday 17th June

Puerto Ayora
Isla Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands.

0 44.914 S
90 18.417 W



Gerry began the day by fiddling with the generator; it was running slower than it is supposed to causing the voltage to be less than it is supposed to. He had to speed the timing to correct the problem, the trouble is that it is not the first time that this has happened and he is now pondering the cause. Having done a temporary fix he then began to tighten bolts and the linkage which had worked loose. You know how it goes - once you touch one thing another goes wrong, the linkage suddenly wouldn’t open and when he tested it there as no voltage to it, now it was a case of finding where the connection fault was – this is a fault that wasn’t there when he started out. It turns out that the fuse had blown – the issue then being why did the fuse blow. Gerry decided to by pass the fuse to see what would happen – the result was that it blew the next fuse in the chain. Now we had to replace 2 fuses and we still had no idea what was wrong. Gerry decided to go ashore and see if he could find fuses anywhere – on Sunday?! I elected to stay on the boat and clean the floors and continue with polishing the wood work whilst he called a water taxi and took off with the hand held radio to keep in touch. After being ashore for 10 minutes he called to say that everywhere was closed (duh!) but he was going for a wander to make sure and asked when I was coming ashore, I hadn’t actually planned on going ashore but obviously I was needed so I said to give me half an hour and I would call just as I was leaving so that he could meet me at the taxi dock. I cleaned up, showered and changed clothes then called the taxi and lastly Gerry. I was informed that he was just buying the batteries that we needed and he had found somewhere open to buy the fuses, he would be on his way back to the boat before I got to the dock, as the taxi was already on it’s way out to me we agreed to meet at the internet café after he had dropped the batteries back to the boat. We actually passed each other on route but finally managed to meet up as planned. Almost everything was closed but we found somewhere to have lunch and Gerry told the tale of having a taxi driver who told him that all the hardware stores were closed but when he walked up the main street he found one open and purchased the fuses, he then went a bit further to the battery store and although the shutters were down the side door was open and they were trading so he bought the 2 batteries we needed. His stroll around town had been successful. Following lunch we took a water taxi back out to the boat as Gerry was determined to fix the generator problem and he wanted to get the new batteries installed. Fixing the generator turned out to be simple – install new fuses and it worked again, he couldn’t reproduce the problem that caused the fuses to blow so we are still none the wiser as to what actually happened there. We are keeping our fingers crossed that it was a minor hiccough and it won’t happen again though we do have spare fuses now! Next came the batteries – we removed the 4D AGM (big battery!) that was acting as our engine starter battery and put the 2 new sealed lead acid batteries in the hole that the big one came out of. Gerry connected one of the batteries up to enable us to start the engine and left the other disconnected as a spare (just in case). The 4D that we removed (and yes it did take both of us to remove it) we shifted to the cockpit where we used it to replace the dead 4D that was one of our house batteries (runs all the electrics on the boat except engine starting). This leaves us with a dead 4D battery sitting in the cockpit at present, we are going to have to find somewhere ecologically safe to dispose of it – any one need a very large, heavy, dead battery? Once we had the batteries in place and had test run them it was time to sit back and relax until dinner time which was followed by a TV movie – in English for a change so we could actually understand what was going on.