We anchored before sunrise and, in the early morning, our wellness specialist Maria led us in stretching on the sky deck and then served us a “green smoothie,” a healthy fruit drink. After a scrumptious breakfast of Eggs Benedict and pancakes, we boarded our fleet of Zodiacs. With a guide in each boat plus 10 to 12 guests, we headed out for a “panga ride.” During last night’s briefing about today’s activities, I was careful not to promise that we’d see our first Galápagos penguins, but everyone knew we were hoping to see them this morning!
Naturalist Aura with panguero Max spotted the neat little black and white birds first and alerted the rest of us via radio. Soon all four boats were in the area and everyone was happily snapping photos of penguins, both swimming and then on land. Three birds paraded rapidly over the lava rocks along the shoreline and appeared to be courting. Three was obviously a crowd, and one bird was pushed off into the water by a pair that stood side by side.
We soon continued along the coast of Santiago Island and spotted several striated herons, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, and a solitary yellow-crowned night heron. Back on board we quickly changed into our wet suits and gathered our snorkeling gear and returned to the Zodiacs, which now had snorkel ladders in them.
We spent a solid hour snorkeling among myriad schools of fish of many species. In addition, to our delight, we found fast-moving penguins chasing through huge schools of 2-inch long fish, a few swirling sea lions, and several white-tipped reef sharks. One shark was sleeping in a cave and the brave among us approached to within a couple of feet to take photos.
Meanwhile, Aura and a smaller group of guests were on Sombrero Chino’s tiny white-sand beach where they were entertained by a curious teenage sea lion who sniffed them each in turn, and a feeding penguin that caught a couple of fish while they watched! And all this intense activity and educational fun occurred before lunch!
In the afternoon, after our lunch and siesta, the guests joined me in the lounge for my presentation about living on Volcan Alcedo many years ago while doing field research for my PhD. I explained that I caught the garua mist to drink. On our lava walk later at Sullivan Bay, the cool gray clouds turned suddenly into a heavy garua mist and, for the first time, this group was baptized by the cool season’s garua. No one doubted that this garua mist could be caught to provide drinking water! We got quite damp from just the mist. But the variety of textures and forms of the lava flow on the afternoon’s walk was lovely and, despite the dampness, we all enjoyed the lava hike.
During cocktail hour, I outlined the activities for tomorrow and our final day’s visit to the spectacular northern island of Genovesa – home to more than 200,000 red-footed boobies. Video chronicler Patrick showed the preview of his video and we were impressed by his footage from this week’s trip. Our delicious barbecue dinner – originally planned for the sky deck – was moved inside tonight, but was nonetheless both very good eating and lots of fun. Most of us went off to bed early tonight as tomorrow is going to be another full day and our last one, in the Encantadas!
