Friday 28th August 2015 – Morning
Here was the introduction to the day.
And the detailed programme written by Carlos on the board.
What is not written here though is that the night before he recommended to wake up at dawn because we could spot some whales. So most of us were awake at 6am. Here was the sea at dawn.
There was this male fregate bird hovering over the boat that morning. We can identify he is a male because he has a red neck.
We did see some whales! One of them.
Another one, maybe a Minke whale?
Another whale
We had brekky at 7am.
It was really nice as there was bacon and pancake.
“Bacon, pancake and whales, that`s what we should have every morning!” said Patrick and everyone agreed to that.
7.30am we got ready to go walking and 8am we were in the panga to head to Espinanza Point and do a dry landing there.
Volcanic ground on which we walked.
Another moon star fish.
Crab ready to jump. This is how juvenile crabs look, then they change colour when they become adults.
Adult crab.
Heron ready to catch a fish, oblivious to us. Just a note that 95% of all the photos I am putting in the blog are not cropped but added here as they were shot. My maximum zoom was 206mm. It tells you how close you can get to the animals in the Galapagos.
Iguana eating.
He uses his claws to hang to the rock.
Water channel
The particularity of this specific Point is to see the iguanas swimming. All those little dots in the water are their head.
They get out of the water and agglutinate to share body warmth and warm up. From time to time, they spit out salt from their nose. We spent quite a while lingering around this spot where we had just landed all stuck in a deep observation of this amazing Galapagos wildlife, taking photos of the iguanas, herons and crabs.
We continued our walk and saw this skeleton of a whale.
Close-up on the bones.
Continuing the walk.
View of the sea.
Carlos showed us the skull of a sea lion.
We also saw the skeleton of an iguana.
When we walked further, we saw a couple of Eagle rays hanging around in a bay.
There was this red bull puffer fish also hanging around. You see him all the time everywhere. Carlos said once a friend of him wanted to tease one that was a bit bigger than that and was handing over to him a bit of bread and the fish bited a chunk of his finger!
Another heron really focused on the fish he wants to catch.
Walking back.
It is interesting how the lava formation has crevasses which can be 2 to 3 meters deep.
View around with beautiful cactus in the foreground.
And guess what we were all looking at after?
Baby sea lion giving us a show. It was really sad though as its left eye was totally red. He kept scratching it, we could see it was in pain and we were helpless, it was sad.
The sand
We also saw this agglutinated bunch of fly larvaes, so many so many of them.
Iguana pausing for us (of course!).
Sea turtle popping up its head out of the water.
Cormoran couple on their nest.
Did you notice they added a sea star to it? They decorate their nest. This is so cute. 🙂
We saw a mummy sea lion breast-feeding a young one.
While we watched them, there was also nearby a cormoran bringing back alguae from his swim to make the nest more cosy.
Another view of the surroundings.
Baby sea lion ready to play.
Oops, half of the body of that one was on the path, almost walked on him.
We got back into the panga and back to the boat. There we changed in our snorkling gears and went snorkling about 30 minutes later. This time many of us doubled our wetsuits. I did that too. The first moment entering the water was still really difficult, some just close their eyes and stop breathing for a minute, some like me just scream as the water is really freezing! But then we got used to it again, it just takes 2-5 minutes to adjust really. With the double wetsuit, I didn`t feel cold this time,
which was great. On this first snorkle,we were in really shallow water. We saw cormorans and lots of turtles, always one or two next to each other, and then again a few minutes later another one, and then again another one. The best was to see at the beginning of the snorkle an iguana munching about one meter below us. He was grabbing some rocks with his front feet to give himself stability and then munching the algaes. We saw another one swimming Patrick had a great moment swimming with a cormoran the same way as we had the afternoon before but I didn`t. A few of us saw some ray, I didn`t. Then we came back to the boat and had a tamarind juice. Yeah cause I forgot to say that most of the time when we came back from walks or snorkle we had snacks and juices waiting for us, mornings and afternoons. Spoiled you get when you go there, seriously!!
Then went for a quick fresh water rinse and had lunch. Started most of the days with soup.
Beautiful meal.
Desert.
Then we rested until 3pm.
Pom explores 