Crew Log 213 – The Bustling Thoroughfare

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April 1, 2010 – At Sea, 04º 39’N, 087º 26’W
By Herb McCormick

The first time I visited the Galapagos Islands was over fifteen years ago, leading a group of about twenty Cruising World magazine readers on a sailing vacation through the archipelago. We’d chartered two of the handful of boats available for such trips, and on our two weeks rambling about we rarely saw another vessel. Back then, the restrictions on cruising sailors imposed by the Ecuadorian government were excessive, and it was a rare yachtsman indeed who was granted permission to wander about the Galapagos on his own boat. “Pristine,” I remember thinking. “This place is pristine.”

It still is. But there’s another word I’d add to my description based on our recent visit aboard Ocean Watch. Busy. Holy cow: Is it busy.

The very first thing we saw as we cruised into the lively harbor known as Academy Bay on Isla Santa Cruz was a big, three-masted “head boat” for live-aboard tourists that had come to grief just off the island’s southern coast only a week before. For sailors, shipwrecks provide spine-shivering object lessons and cautionary tales; this one, for me at least, would come to symbolize something altogether different that its quite obvious and literal example.

That’s because, as soon as we pulled into the bay, I realized it would take a whole lot of poor navigators and toppled vessels to put any sort of dent in the charter business. At least a dozen large dive boats and small cruise ships dotted the anchorage, along with several dozen more private yachts of all sizes and description, including nearly thirty sailboats flying the banners of a Pacific rally sponsored by a British sailing magazine. To service all the shore-side traffic into the adjacent town of Puerto Ayora, about ten pangas serving as water taxis zipped to and fro. And that big Italian-looking number sitting just outside the harbor entrance? Rumor had it that the garish super yacht had been rented to that noted, couch-jumping eco-tourist, Tom Cruise.

A stroll through downtown Puerto Ayoro was equally jarring. The main drag and back streets were lined with hotels, hostels, dive shops, t-shirt emporiums, jewelry stores, restaurants and taverns. The assembled throng ranged from obviously upscale visitors on group tours dressed in the latest resort wear, to scruffy backpackers in baggies with surfboards under their arms. Every other car was a local taxi: invariably a white, late-model Japanese pick-up truck festooned with a name across the top of its windshield. Business, and everything else, appeared brisk.

All that is to say: Things changed fast.

Today on Ocean Watch, the crew is nearing the offshore Costa Rican island called Cocos, a diver’s paradise and wildlife preserve over two-hundred miles off the Central American mainland. Having crossed the equator yesterday, last evening two new “Pollywogs” were initiated into the order of King Neptune: For now and evermore, Bryce Seidl and Dan Clark are Shellbacks through and through. Sometime very early Friday morning, they’ll make their first landfall as seasoned voyagers off the tiny, remote island of Cocos. We’ll relate more of the entire crew’s experience in our next crew log.

This one will again focus on the Galapagos.

In Puerto Ayoro, we made the acquaintance of an extremely knowledgeable and interesting chap called Stuart Banks, an oceanographer at the Charles Darwin Research Station who’s lived and worked in the islands for nearly a decade. When I told him the place and pace sure seemed a lot more hectic than the last time I was here, he confirmed I wasn’t off my rocker.

“Fifty years ago there was hardly anybody here,” he said. “In 1960, there were four thousand people. Now we get between 140,000 and 160,000 tourists a year. In the last ten years, there’s been an increase of 14 percent every year. It’s one of the greatest increases anywhere and that kind of pushes everything else.”

It’s pushing everything else all right. Hard.

The Galapagos dive book we have on board, by Steve Rosenberg and Ellen I. Sarbone, was published in 2004, so it’s obviously dated. But the figures therein are still revealing. “Organized tourism to the Galapagos began in the late 1960’s,” they write. “The first live-aboard yacht, with accommodations for fifty-eight passengers, began cruising in 1970. A master plan for tourism written in 1974 initially allowed a yearly maximum of 12,000 visitors. The number increased to 60,000 in 1990… By 2002 there were over 100 yachts and ships offering cruises, and it is estimated that a minimum of 76,000 travelers visited during each of the last few years.”

Naturally, the numbers of international visitors aren’t the only increase in human habitation. Then there’s the Ecuadorians.

“The majority of the present-day inhabitants moved to the islands from the Ecuadorian mainland since the 1950’s,” write Rosenberg and Sarbone. “Because the population was increasing so rapidly (300-400% between 1980 and 1995), the government had to do something to curb it. While the official population count was 17,000 in early 2003, the actual number was much higher (possibly up to 25,000) and growing, having tripled since the early 1980’s. Legally, only official residents can work in the islands, where the major occupations are tourism, fishing and farming.”

Today, unofficially, we heard there were upwards of almost 50,000 full-time residents, spread over the five islands, with the grand majority centered on Santa Cruz.

Are you spotting a trend?

A lot of what Stuart Banks and his fellow researchers at the Darwin center address in their daily occupation is “the inevitability of climate change” and how it relates to the incredible biodiversity that literally defines the place, a topic in and of itself that we’ll return to in the next few logs. Today, we’re discussing one thing and one thing only: People.

“In the Galapagos Islands we still have the opportunity to do something, but that window of opportunity is rapidly closing because Galapagos, like most other parts of the world, is also developing very rapidly,” said Banks. “Galapagos was once disconnected from other parts of the world because logistically (the islands) were particularly inhospitable places to be. Now all that’s changing and Galapagos has connectivity to the rest of the world that was never there before. A lot of our work is trying to assess the level of risk presented by this new kind of interaction of people in the archipelago.”

Like anywhere else, there is no lack of special-interest groups and organizations: tourism, the naturalist guides, the National Park, the local fishing sector and fish cooperatives. What were once seemingly endless resources and reserves are now less so. Banks and his mates, who provide the scientific data on which hopefully sound decisions will be made, have a large task on their hands.

“There are all these additional human effects,” he says. “Fishing, tourism, perhaps local pollution in port zones, local development, and how all that intersects with this complicated climate dynamic, which is particularly difficult. In other parts of the world people are trying to do the same but there are few places like Galapagos, where in many senses it’s a natural laboratory to follow processes and see what’s really going on.”

Yes, these wonderful islands on the equator are a living marine lab, and in that regard they are also a microcosm for the grander world in which they are a small but important part. And like the rest of the planet, more than even climate change or global warming, the greatest threat to the islands, and to mankind, is too many people. As the great (and immodest) Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson once said of himself: It’s the straw that stirs the drink.

More than anything else, that’s what I thought of strolling down the streets of Puerto Ayoro, a bustling thoroughfare indeed, a tiny dot on a twirling planet that might just be spinning out of control.

-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

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