The sound of bubbles playing over the hull woke us – a soft whoosh that felt at once mellow and playful. The source of the bubbles was soon discovered: two sea lion pups, swimming around the boat in joyful loops and spirals. We had dropped the hook in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, on Isla San Cristóbal, the day before and the famed natural world of Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands was immediately surrounding us.
We had arrived aboard our 1971 Wauquiez Centurion 32, after a 10-day, 1,000-mile passage from Panama. In an attempt to avoid the worst of the doldrums, we had set a southerly course out of Panama City to take advantage of the strong northerlies that funnelled across the isthmus, motoring through two days of flat calm as we approached Ecuador, then we tacked and headed straight west, reaching along on the light south-easterlies that rolled off the coast of South America. It was an easy passage, if slower than we would have liked; our drifter pulled us along at a mellow pace of three to four knots most of the time. The
