Woke up around 6:45am for a 7am breakfast call. Neither of us got seasick (thankfully), but a tiny bit dizzy. Hoping we get our sea legs soon. Everyone was slowly emerging for breakfast and it seems we all got through the night without issue. Our group is starting to gel – we all fit at one table and everyone seems to have the same adventurous spirit, so it is fun to talk about travelling. After breakfast, we had our morning briefing and learned our plan for the day.
Our first stop is on the West side of Isabela Island in a place called Punta Moreno. We took the Zodiacs to shore to go exploring. While en route to land, we started to see sea turtles in the open ocean – they would pop their heads up, look around, and then go back down again. We saw at least half a dozen in 5-10 minutes - we are newbies at this, so every time one would pop up, someone would point and yell "TURTLE!" It was very exciting.
Isabela is the largest and one of the youngest Galapagos islands – only a million years old. It has 6 or 7 (still active) volcanos that still erupt fairly regularly. The hiking – at least where we were – was almost entirely made up of walking on black lava rocks.
Life still exists everywhere, and we could see a fair amount of greenery, grasses, and cactuses. One of the cool sites at this stop was the tide pools that form during low tide – large pools of water where marine life can hang out (or get trapped) until high tide. Within five minutes of leaving the Zodiacs, we saw in the tide pool: a sea turtle, a baby sea lion, at least 3 white tipped reef sharks, a flightless cormorant, and a group of huge puffer fish, not to mention bucket loads of bright red “sally lightfoot” crabs that hang out everywhere.
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| Tide Pool where we saw turtle, shark, sea lion, puffer fish |
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| Sally Lightfoot Crab |
Continuing our walk, we learned a lot more about volcanos and lava and made our way back to the water where the Zodiacs were waiting to take us on a tour along the coast where we had our first look at Galapagos penguins – they are tiny little things standing maybe only a foot tall – sharing a rock formation with marine iguanas. At first, I was so busy watching the penguins that I never even noticed all of iguanas on top of the rocks just staring at us – they are black, sitting on black rocks, and blend into the rocks that well. But once you see them, they are everywhere!
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| Penguins in the middle, iguanas on top of the rocks |
The iguanas are swimmers, so in addition to all the ones on the rocks, they were also in the water, just their beady little eyes and heads sticking out of the water slithering around. Iguanas always look pissed and they stare at you like they are looking for an appropriate way to attack… but I’m sure that is all in my head.
We had another baby sea lion following our Zodiac around playing. They are just such curious animals!
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| Playing behind the Zodiac |
We made it back to the ship to collect snorkel gear and get fitted for wetsuits, and then hopped back on the Zodiacs for "open water" snorkeling (we just jump, roll or fall off the zodiacs rather than walk in from a beach).
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| Glamour Girl |
The water was a lot murkier than I was expecting so it was hard to see what all was around us, but we did see some colorful fish, a few sea turtles and a few sea lions that played with us for a while. I was able to take some great pictures of a sea lion that kept swimming into my face, but sadly, I forgot to turn on my camera so they will remain good memories. This pic is courtesy of Elsie.
We came back to the boat after an hour or so, everyone cleaned up and then we had lunch followed by “siesta time” while we re-locate to our afternoon spot. Right now, I’m on the upper deck writing and waiting for our afternoon excursion. Not such a bad life…
Our afternoon outing was to take the Zodiacs into the mangroves at Elizabeth Bay, also on Isabela. On our ride from the ship to the mangroves, we saw our first official blue footed boobie!
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| Blue Footed Boobie and some other bird I forgot |
One of the coolest things about Galapagos is that on every rock, or in the water, you never just see one type of critter – you see a bunch. So, on a small lava rock, we saw the boobie, some flightless cormorants, a penguin and two baby sea lions and a bunch of crabs.
As we entered the mangroves, the scenery was gorgeous – greenish water that became clear when the sun hit it. We were on a hunt for more critters - our targets - reef sharks, sea turtles, and rays.
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| Another bird I forgot |
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| Entering the mangroves |
We cruised around for about 45 minutes without much luck and then we found a huge stingray resting on the floor- the water looked generally fairly shallow – maybe 10’ or so.
Then we started seeing sea turtles – EVERYWHERE. The just kept popping their heads up no matter where you looked.
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| Shell colors are amazing |
We worked our way into a tiny cove and saw several baby black tip reef sharks and at least 20 turtles of all sizes.
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| Turtle in back, shark in front |
Then we came across a school of tiny golden rays – much smaller than the stingray, but there had to be about 20-30 that we could see.
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| Golden Rays |
We left the mangroves to circle a small island that was just filled with birds, penguins, sea lions and iguanas and got to watch the sun start to set on our way back to the ship.
We all took quick showers and then headed up stairs to watch a perfect sunset before dinner. The evening ritual seems to be all of us gathering on the top deck to watch the sunset and have a drink, then the daily briefing around 7 to recap the day and learn plans for tomorrow, followed by dinner at 7:30 where we stay and chat with the group for a bit, and then everyone goes to bed pretty early. Which is fine since it looks like our group has agreed to early morning outings in order to see the best stuff. With only about a 3-hour cruise to our next destination, we didn’t have much rough water and slept well.
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| Gratuitous baby seal lion face |
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