The “belly” of the Clipper is full again. We filled the fuel tanks, this morning, near the Island Baltra, north of Isla Santa Cruz. We did this to raise the change that we will arrive on time on Tahiti. Because there is the chance that Aeolus is not in our favor.
The distance from the Galapagos to Tahiti is 3700 nautical miles, this is the longest section of the whole journey. After some maneuver between the rocks and islands of the Galapagos archipelago, we arrived at the north side of Isla Isabella.
A group of frigate-birds flies along, but after a while they realized that we went the same direction so they stopped flying and hitchhiked on the top of the mast.
One of our crewmembers turned the webcam to this sight. A big screen below deck shows all the pictures of the webcams, when something happens we are allowed to turn the camera, so people on land can enjoy it also live.
There has been a change of crew, Eef joined us on board. She is one of the editors of the VPRO website. She sits a lot of the time below deck behind her laptop, not far away from the big screen. When she saw the frigate-birds on the screen, she got her camera and took some pictures of the screen! Come on Eef! Ten steps outside and you can see them in real life and photograph them. I often question myself if the amount of looking to screens is related to the awareness of virtuality and reality…

Richard Slootweg
Captain Clipper Stad Amsterdam