Floreana Island: Cormorant Point, Champion Islet and Post Office Bay

Today we get up early for a walk on Cormorant Point. The walk starts at a beach with coarse sand, brown in color, and, if you look more closely, there are green fragments. These fragments are made of peridot, a mineral thought to be abundant in the mantle of our planet. The other part of the beach is made up of basalt, cinders and shells. After a short walk along a smooth path winding through a dry landscape we end at a completely different beach. Here the sand is fine, almost flowery and white. The prime material here is calcium carbonate, the left-over product of coral colonies and ground shells.

Just behind the highest tide mark, embedded in low dunes we see the dents made by dozens of female green sea turtles. This beach is an important nesting site for turtles in the archipelago. Unfortunately we see also signs of an introduced animal in the form of footprints; feral cats come regularly to prey on turtle hatchlings. Cats are still kept by the inhabitants of Floreana as pets, and some cat-owners here refuse to get the animals neutered or spaded. This results in too many cat litters. Neglect of these litters encourages cats to become feral, and there are no predators of cats that control their number. Difficult issues like these can only be addressed with education, and hopefully we can convince the children of Floreana that having cats could eventually result in giving up a number of endemic animals.

A good example is the Floreana mockingbird, an elusive bird only surviving in small populations on satellite islets of Floreana, where cats cannot come. After we spot almost a dozen of these mockingbirds we head out for snorkeling. At this point the sunlight comes nearly straight from above and with hardly a cloud in sight we have the perfect lighting to marvel at the colorful reef fish and other organisms like sea stars and corals. Sea lions frolic around us to complete the fun.

In the afternoon we anchor at Post Office Bay. It is a calm anchorage at the lee side of Floreana, where you can still see the remnants of a freshwater creek. Probably this is the reason that the bay got marked on earlier maps as a good site to refit a ship after a long voyage. This tradition was kept until the whaling era, and it is probably then that sailors planted an empty barrel as a makeshift post office. Nowadays we still use it that way, and we have fun listening to the addresses and anticipating our own mail delivery, for tradition demands that we hand-deliver any mail taken from this barrel.

We end the day with a Zodiac ride, a swim or a stretching session on the beach, enjoying a blue sky and a calm ocean. A clean sunset promises more adventure tomorrow, but right now most of us are so full of new impressions that the night seems more welcome than ever.