Operation Zapato

The highlight of the Galápagos? Seeing a hammerhead shark while snorkeling.
The non-animal-related highlight of the Galápagos? Operation Zapato.

Midway through our week aboard the Tip Top III, we decided to play a prank on Tip Top II, another yacht in our fleet. (Our one-sided feud began after the passengers of Tip Top II saw a killer whale and two hammerhead sharks and we did not). And so, at 2AM on Christmas morning, an elite strike team of “ninja-pirates” woke up, dressed in black, and assembled on deck. With the help of two of the crew, we rowed a dinghy across to our target (Codename: Booby). I´m proud to say I was the first to board the Tip Top II. Cam, Tom, and I hurriedly stuffed their shoes into garbage bags, and we rowed silently back to the mothership.


Although we executed the theft flawlessly, our prank didn´t go off entirely as planned. The next morning, the passengers and crew of the Tip Top II did not grasp immediately that they had been punkd. Instead, they concluded that their shoes had been stolen by fisherman. (You would have thought that they would have been tipped off by the sight of us watching them through our binoculars, but evidently not).

Confusion aboard the Tip Top II

By the time everything had been resolved, the captain of the Tip Top II had threatened to report us to the Port Authority, a 13-year-old was in tears because she thought her new Converse were lost forever, and our very-German naturalist was nearly thrown in the water by the crew of the Tip Top II. Eventually, the passengers of the Tip Top II landed on the beach, where they found their shoes along with our message in the sand.