So last night was a crazy night!
We where in town doing some internet and organizing a dive tour for the morning.
While sitting and talking about our dinner plans we overheard a conversation at a table next to us. ” ….. evacuate…….. tsunami ……… earthquake ……”
Those words rang some alarm bells in our heads, so we went to the next place with internet and checked the news. That is where we found out that there has been a big earthquake in chile and that there is a Tsunami alert for the Pacific.
We went straight to the port captain to ask for permission to leave the port and head out in to deep waters. There was a lot of chaos there. It seamed like they where working on there evacuation plan for the village and we where told to wait for a moment while the officer went to ask his superior if we had permission to leave. The officer came back quickly, and with a serious expression on his face told us. “LEAVE NOW!!!! straight away and tell all the boats to do the same!”
We all started running towards the port that was 1 km away! We tried to stop a taxi, but he was full with people, we where lucky on the second car we tried to stop and he gave us a lift to the port where we took our dinghy back to the boat. There we told the boats around us about the tsunami (most of them new already). Then we weighed anchor and headed out in to deep water.
We listen carefully on channel 16 on the VHF for updates about the tsunami. After 1 hour we started to go over what had just happened, our running, the village, our family. We stared sending text messages to our family to let them know that we where okej and that we where in deep water, the only thing we could do now was wait.
The alarm was canceled at 1H40 am at witch point we stared our way back to the port.
Luckily it was a false alert. Although we would have been safe in deep water the villages here in the Galapagos would have been devastated by a serious Tsunami.
We anchored around 3 am and we where happy to be back in the harbor, now we where just wondering if we where going to do our dive tomorrow or not…?
Markus and Cathy Beckers
Ocean Diaries 