Two days to departure! Here’s how we are getting the ship stocked up for the trip… 

FOOD FOR A FEW MONTHS

We’ve done 98% of our provisioning, which includes a huge amount of shelf stable food in our pantry. The local supermarket in Puerto Ayora (the town in Santa Cruz island of Galapagos) was quite good and we got 3 shopping carts worth of food. This supplements the 4 shopping carts of food from Bahia Caraquez, Ecuador. 

 

 

Aboard Aldebaran we’ve got many kilograms of pasta, rice, flour, granola, and everything else you can imagine, all carefully stored in containers in different bins, or vacuum bags to prevent bugs and moisture. Organizing all this is a huge project in itself which Sabrina has been mastering. 

All that is left… on Saturday morning 6am we’ll buy fresh fruits and veggies at the farmer’s market and then get underway!! 

Oh yes, we also need to buy another case of wine – we discovered we can stack the boxed wine cartons under the beds 

🙂  

WATER FOR 30 DAYS

Along the way, we make water for drinking with our small capacity watermaker (1.5gallons per hour, running off our 12volt batteries) but we don’t like to run it inside harbors like Puerto Ayora. Unfortunately there are sooo many ships here running generators that the water smells like diesel. 

 

 

Recall there is no dock here in Galapagos to tie up to and fill water. So the main option is to pay a water taxi to bring us water, which costs about $50 for 100 gallons. 

 

 

Instead we learned a trick from our buddies Diego and Carolina who live on a sailboat in San Cristobal: going to all the tourist cruise boats asking for water. They have massive watermakers with multiple filters and enough water to pressure wash their decks, so we ask them for 15 gallons at a time. With her sweet smile Sabrina asked all the boats here in the harbor and filled 100 gallons of water to top off our 140 gallon tank. Awesome! 

We estimate this will last us about a month for 4 crew member, with just over 1 gallon per day, which is kinda skimpy! The way we pull this off is by using a lot of salt water – to wash dishes, bathe ourselves, even for some limited cooking – and then do a final short rinse with fresh water. 

 We hope to catch some rainwater along the way with our new cockpit roof, and we’ll make a little surplus water whenever we are motoring and using our watermaker… although that is a very slow process.

FUEL FOR A WHILE

I’m not sure how long our 135 gallons of diesel will last, theoretically it can move us about 900 nautical miles. Our total distance to Gambier is close to 3000 nautical miles! Thankfully we are crossing the SE trade wind belt which is one of the most consistent breeze areas in the world, so we expect to arrive with plenty of diesel, in fact enough to get us to Marquesas (another 900 miles). 

  

  

We’re also bringing 20 gallons of gasoline for our dinghy and scuba compressor, which are efficient engines, and will hopefully be easier to replenish along the way…

 

 

The last “flammable” item is propane for cooking, which we have 2 big bottles worth (16lbs each). This is a tricky one as the propane fill in French Polynesia has unusual fittings, and it might be awhile before we’re able to fill those back up. Yet, those two large bottles should last us a little more than two months.