Yesterday in the morning when we woke up, we saw that the cargo-ship Galpaface1 had landed on the rock next to carola beach just behind us.

The coastguard and a lot of local lanchas and dingis where driving around the ship and we saw that they put out yellow oil protections.

 

What we heard from the locals is that the captain lost his position around 2am when they lifted anchor to head to Santa Cruz and the ship drove straight in to the rocks.

Now it t seams that the  situation is more or leas under control, but there is still a big risk of the ship sinking and leaking fuel.

 

Today when going back to the boat we talked to a man that was working on the recovery of the ship and he told us that the ship has around 10 000 gallons of diesel and that they had  taken out 5000, but that they had to stop because they were afraid that the ship was going to tip over.

The Galpaface1 is full with cargo as it just came in 3 or 4 days ago from mainland Ecuador.

The ship has some big scratches on the hull where water is coming in, the engines are already flooded so the ship is out of power.

A tugboat has been send from mainland, but will take another 3 days to get here. Heavy pumps are on the way by plain, and should be arriving today.

 

 

The main problem seams to be, all dow similar things have happened before here in galapagos in reacent years, that Galapagos dose not seam to have any of the equipment necessary to deal with a situation like this.

You need a tugboat to be abel to move a big ship, flotation devices or balloons that keep the boat floating in situations like this and heavy pumps to take the water out in case water is coming in to the ship.

But then another question awakes when you think is what is the big cargo ships doing here anyways?  What they do is bring things to the islands that OK are necessary, but a lot of the things are not. Not if you want to keep the islands as endemic as you can. What we see from our boat is a cargo full with construction things…

It’s a duble moral situation.

 

They shouldn’t bring in more things, but as they do, they should definitely have all the necessary things to deal with a situation like this or not?

Hmmmm….

Cathy