Floreana Island (Cormorant Point, Champion Islet, Post Office Bay)
We started our day with a pre-breakfast outing on Cormorant Point to explore the wilderness of this island as the sun was rising. The trail here led us to a beautiful white sand beach, which happens to be one of the most common nesting areas of the Pacific green sea turtles.
We repositioned National Geographic Islander, anchoring close to Champion Islet, a place full of seabirds nesting along the cliffs and with and endemic species of cacti. This satellite islet of Floreana holds a perfect habitat for the very rare Floreana mockingbird. We happened to spot few of them on our Zodiac ride around this magnificent islet.
The visibility underwater around Champion was so great that we saw some schools of fish from the Zodiac, such as the King angelfish. The place was inviting us to explore the underwater ecosystem of the Galápagos, and we certainly did get into the water finding an outstanding place full of many species of tropical fish and some coral heads. Some of us had some very close encounters with playful sea lions.
We couldn’t leave Floreana without learning about the human history of the Galápagos Islands, and during the afternoon we visited the famous Post Office Bay. The barrel situated at Post Office Bay holds many ancient stories from the 17th century and is still nowadays a very easy and practical way to communicate with the rest of the world. One simply leaves their postcard in the hopes that a future traveler to the islands will hand-deliver it.
Floreana was the first island to be inhabited by humans, with many interesting stories about the first settlers who lived on this island.
