Team Galapagos has finally reached escape velocity and has left La Paz. We always enjoy our time here; under normal conditions La Paz is a fun place to hang out with great walking, dining and provisioning. But these are far from normal times and so we now move on for some old fashioned social isolation.

As we slowly make our way out of Mexico, we have enabled our Iridium Go satellite hotspot. Even though the software is pretty awful, it has given us the ability to text and email with friends and family. And now we have yet another way to stay in touch with our adoring fans. This post was sent from the Sat Phone, giving us an opportunity to write from anywhere we may find ourselves. We hope you enjoy these short posts and will forgive any errors or typos; once we send out the post we have no way of seeing or correcting our mistakes until we are within cell range.

We have also enabled our new tracking page which you can find at the bottom of our blog.This gives our location and allows us to make a short comment with greater reliability than our old tracking app. Alternatively, you may bookmark this link: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Galapagos?mapMode=useGoogle

Like all of you, we are looking forward to a day when we can make plans for more than a day in advance. Till then, stay healthy.

Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.

I am in my old home town of Martin Tennessee, visiting family this week.  It is cold and rainy, a good day to revisit warmer days in my journal.

Melissa and I have been keeping journals since we began cruising in 2017.  Now, two years on, the value of writing about my thoughts and experiences has grown. Being able to look back in time and  relive a day is a satisfying pleasure. Maybe not always a pleasure; some entries are decidedly better than others. Just like life.

Michael’s Journal; a little worse for the wear

I will read my journal entry for the day a year ago before I write my thoughts for the present. I did this recently and read the entry for my mother over morning coffee.  It is a nice way to share a part of your life with someone you love.

The entry for that day a year ago was of a hike that Melissa and I took on Isla Coronados. I present it here just as written, with incoherent/impure thoughts.

Isla Coronados                                                                 Miercoles, el Doce de Dec

We got an early start to our day yesterday as we made ready to climb the small volcano that comprises this island. 926 feet does not sound very high and it isn’t but the seven miles of trail to make that 926 feet was an effort.

The trails at and around the beach areas are great; flat, sandy or small hard packed gravel that is demarked by stones. These paths lull you into the notion that the entire trail to the summit will be a similar, Dorthy and Toto situation with skipping and  frolicsome good cheer over gentle rises & pleasant vistas.

The deceptively easy start of our hike

In the real, Mexican, world these trails end where the volcanic debris; stones of basalt and something else about the size of a baby’s head pile up to form a badlands like area surrounding the cone. Cairns are put up through these stony hillocks and they are sometimes hard to spot; one pile of rocks look pretty much like every other pile of rocks after a while.

See the trail? I can’t either

The stone section is not particularly steep but ankles must be cared for & I am very glad that both Melissa and I were wearing our hiking boots.

As the angle of ascent increased, the baby head stones gave way to dirt & gravel and required twice the effort due to the sliding back we did.  I should mention that during this hike and all such strenuous endeavors Melissa and I do not stay together.  We each go at a pace that is comfortable for ourselves. This means that I am frequently  well ahead of Melissa and we both are alone but nearby for the most part. I stop periodically and Melissa catches up to me which means that I get a little rest and she usually just keeps trudging on which is unfair and probably sexist.

Such endeavors are sort of private affairs though; we are each testing ourselves physically & mentally and tests are meant to be taken in the privacy of one’s own brain.

The steep, slidy part eventually gives way to less steep, even pleasant trails to the summit which would be more enjoyable if not for the prior exertions.  But a summit is still a small victory for us as we advance in years and the sense of accomplishment is still as real at 58 years old as it was as a boy. The view was territorial and of value not so much for its beauty but for what it meant about ourselves.

The view from the summit. Galapagos is down there, somewhere, with cold beers waiting.

Keeping a journal has been a habit I am very happy to have made while cruising and I continue to write, more or less faithfully, each day. Having the time to sit quietly, and give an account of myself for half an hour is one of the many gifts I am grateful to have been given with our cruising life.

Many days my entries are as dull as bilge water; the quotidian goings on of work on the boat or what aches or what the weather is doing. Sometimes I work through more serious worries and sometimes I write about what has made me happy or that I am grateful for. I like those best. I try not to be too worried about what I write as long as I get something about the day down on paper.

Even the dullest entries take on a special shine when you read them a year or more later because you get to look at your past self.  It is like a little coffee stained time machine.

Although we have a little apartment in San Carlos, I still spend a lot of time down at the boat. I like to go down in the morning when it is still sort of cool and have my coffee in the cockpit and check in on the cruiser’s radio net. The cruiser’s net is short and sweet this time of year; there are only four or five boats and after that I get busy with a few projects. It is a pleasant routine that has allowed me to tackle those little chores that always seem to get pushed to mañana.

This week I started making new soft shackles for Galapagos. For the uninitiated, a soft shackle is a loop of very strong line, with an eye and a large knot that acts like a shackle.  In many places where you might need a strong stainless steel shackle, this soft, easy to make device can do the job better and with less cost.

Five new Soft Shackles made from 1/4 inch Dyneema winch cable. All five were made for less than twenty dollars.

If your eyes started to glaze over after that last paragraph, that’s okay.  Not everyone really cares about button knots or Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene rope.  Feel free to scroll to the bottom of this post for a picture of an interesting insect.

For the rest of you really cool people, I will share some of the links and tricks that have helped me learn to make soft shackles and improve my technique as well as a source for Dyneema that has been much less expensive than a chandlery.

To get started in making Soft Shackles I have found that L-36.com by Allen Edwards is a great resource.  He has a number of pages now devoted to making soft shackles of various types and for special applications. To get started and to keep things simple, I like the Better Soft Shackle. The instructions are easy to follow and importantly, Allen has a small calculator built into the page to allow you to determine the measurements needed for a specific diameter of shackle. Be sure to check out the other topics available on L-36.com.  Lots of good stuff there. And of course there are tons of YouTube videos to help you along the way.

Fifty feet of Dyneema 1/4 inch line for $19

I should make it clear that I am using the trademark name Dyneema  for the material that is more generically, and far less melodically known as Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWE) Since Ultra High Blah Blah Blah doesn’t really roll off the tongue, let’s just continue calling this stuff Dyneema. Like Xerox means copy and Kleenex means, well, Kleenex. Spectra is another trademark product name for this type of line.

Most of the line I use on Galapagos for soft shackles is 3/16 or 1/4 inch.  1/4 inch Dyneema has a breaking strength of over 7000 pounds which is more than adequate for almost any application on our boat.  You can go to your favorite marine chandlery and buy Dyneema line made by Samson in a variety of colors and with additional coatings to protect the line.

Samson line is great but if you would like to save some money for the same material, check out winch cable replacement line on Amazon.  Apparently, off road vehicles, snow plows and other road machines that carry electric winches are now switching from steel cable to Dyneema line.  Most of the items I see are 50 foot lengths with an eye and stainless thimble already on one end.  Some of the product will have a hook spliced on as well which isn’t particularly useful but who knows.  The important thing is that for less than twenty bucks you can get 50 feet of Dyneema that works as well as the marine store brand. BTW, West Marine is selling 1/4 inch Samson Dyneema for $1.62 a foot.

Here is one link to the kind of cable we are talking about. Synthetic-Winch-Rope . You can find similar products on E-Bay as well.

Update on quality of Dyneema 9-14:

Astute reader Jamie Gifford of Sailing Totem pointed out that there is a difference in quality between the Samson Dyneema and the winch cable being sold on Amazon.  The Samson product is a higher quality product with a higher breaking strength and it is backed by the reputation of an American company that makes rope for numerous industrial applications.

The winch cable on Amazon by contrast is made in China and is of a lower quality.  In fact it would be difficult to know exactly what kind of Dyneema is being sold but it is safe to assume that the breaking strength of these winch cables is going to be lower than the Samson product of a similar diameter. A quick search for load testing of the Chinese line showed that it broke at about 76 percent of a recognized brand of the same diameter.

That said, this material is still incredibly strong and is a great value if your application will not approach the maximum break loads of the material.  If you have a critical, high load application, use the best material you can buy for that application.

These are some of the old soft shackles we keep at the helm. We have a similar collection at the mast pulpits.

I could bore you with photos of me dramatically making brummel splices but I’ll spare you.  I will, however share some photos of the knot required.  The knot is an important aspect of the shackle and must be tied correctly and be cinched down as tightly as possible to prevent it from inverting under load.

This Carrick bend forms the basis of the button knot. Pretty, no?

To add additional bulk to the knot, the two ends are brought around and up through the center.

The L-36.com site has instruction for tying this knot here.  Even though I’ve made several of these knots, I find myself referring to L-36 instructions to refresh my memory often.  I find it a tricky knot to tie properly.

Tightening the knot requires considerable force. I use a pair of vice grips and leverage to pull the knot tight. When I’m done the knot should feel as hard as a block of wood.

If you’ve been curious about soft shackles and how to make them, I hope this post will encourage you to spend a few bucks and try your hand.  Once you’ve made a few for yourself and tried them on your boat I think you will find them dead useful.

Name That Bug!

Alright. Now that we’ve gotten the boring stuff out of the way, perhaps you can help us identify this insect. I’ll admit this isn’t the cutest bug we’ve seen down here but I’m sure his mother thought him, or her, quite beautiful. Any entomologists out there that can ID this critter? Leave a comment.

We found this fellow in the pool and rescued him from certain death. That’s his grateful look.