Today’s plan is to find some snorkel gear and bikes so we can explore on our own. We walked to the Malecon and stopped in a store that rents gear – we rented masks, fins & snorkels for a whopping $5 per day! We tried to find a bike rental shop, but sadly, with so many stored closed, there was only one bike rental shop and they were out of bikes. The owner said that because of Covid, they had to sell their bikes just to stay open, so they didn’t have many rentals left. Luckily, it is a small island and we had done the hike yesterday, so with a full load of water, towels, and snorkel gear, we walked back to Charles Darwin Cove, the snorkel spot we had seen yesterday.
There were maybe 6-8 other people around and a bunch of sea lions in nice little cove. We jumped in and after the initial shock of the cold water wore off, we started swimming around.
The sea lions were awesome! They are so curious, and the smaller ones have no fear – they would just swim all around us, dive bomb us, swim right up in our faces, blow bubbles at us and just be all around entertaining.
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| Photo bomb |
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| Blowing bubbles |
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| Checking things out |
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| The standard upside-down approach |
We also found a sea turtle and lots of fish.
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| Sea Lion stealing the spotlight from the sea turtle |
The water was very clear, and there was so much to see. At one point, I was sitting on the concrete “dock” warming up and a baby sea lion popped up right next to the dock, noticed someone’s flip-flops right at the edge, hopped partially onto the dock and grabbed a flip-flop. It proceeded to play with the flip-flop (it floated) and toss it around and swim with it until a guy on a paddleboard finally rescued the shoe. So entertaining!
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| Grabbing the flip flop |
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| Playing with the flip flop |
After snorkeling, we walked back to town and on our way, we had to cross a small foot bridge. This time across, there was an enormous male sea lion blocking the entire bridge. There was a woman on the other side trying to get her bike across the bridge to our side, and we were trying to get back to town. We all yelled at this thing for a few minutes and it really did not care and just rolled on its side to hunker down further. Finally, the woman gave up and turned around giving Damon the opportunity to chase the sea lion off the foot bridge. Damon runs at the sea lion yelling, and instead of scaring it, Damon completely pissed it off and it turned to him and started barking and chasing after him. It was hilarious. But at least he got the sea lion off the bridge.
For lunch, we went to a place called Cri’s Burgers where Damon had a burger called the Terminator – it was about as big as his head and he ate the whole thing…
After lunch, we had a taxi take us to another snorkel spot we had heard about called La Loberia beach. Unfortunately, the surf looked rough – the waves were huge and crashing into rocks, so we opted to just hang out and relax with a sea lion until our taxi came to take us back to our hotel.
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| Chilling in the shade under a lifeguard stand |
We had some more siesta time while we waited for a driver to come pick us up at 5:30 to get fitted for our scuba gear for tomorrow’s adventure. After our scuba fitting, we hung out with the sea lions on the beach before making our way to dinner at The Balcony restaurant, offering great views of the ocean. Our evening wrapped up with more time watching sea lions on the beach – I’m obsessed with the babies - and then heading back up to our hotel for the night.
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