Floreana Island

Today's island is Floreana, one of the four islands visited by Charles Darwin and one of only two islands with fresh water. The day started at the unfortunate hour of 5:30 a.m. for me. The National Geographic photo instructors were leading an early hike at a place called Punta Cormorant. The idea was to see the sunrise and make use of the excellent early morning light. As soon as we were ashore, we walked quickly across a peninsula to a large white sand beach where green sea turtles were supposed to be nesting. We found one turtle on the beach and another actually digging a nest. It was incredible to witness something like this that you'd only ever seen on tv or in books. Every day here seems to hold new wonders.

We found quite a few tracks like these where the turtles had come from the sea to make nests and lay eggs.

This was the first turtle we saw on the beach.

Our next stop was a brackish pond that was home to a number of flamingos. Other than zoos and the plastic lawn variety, most of us had never seen flamingos in the wild. I didn't even know that there were flamingos in the Galapagos before we arrived. We had four or five photo instructors with us which was a great learning opportunity. Even though I've been a photographer since my late teens, I am learning new things every day. They are all very friendly and totally generous with their time. We finished up the hike on the beach where there was a small colony of nesting blue footed boobies. 

You are probably getting the idea that this isn't a resting kind of vacation. It's an expedition without the camping and eating bad food! After lunch, Marilyn went on a glass bottom boat ride and saw most of the same sea creatures that I saw while snorkelling. She also saw more of the birds that were nesting on the cliffs. 

At the same time, I was doing a deep water drift version of snorkelling. We left the Zodiacs and moved along a cliff face with the current. There were some major drop offs where you couldn't see to the bottom and this made an upwelling of water that attracted the fish. I was really stunned by the numbers of fish that we saw. There were schools of fish of all sizes along with sea urchins everywhere, star fish and even some jellyfish. At one point I found myself in a school of thousands of beautiful small blue and silver fish that I was told were anchovies. We also came into a little cove where a group of sea lions were swimming and they circled around us, one coming inches from me. Mind boggling!!

This is the type of location where we were dropped off for deep water snorkelling. 

The naturalists would dive down and point out things to the rest of us.

This is what is looked like to be in the middle of a school of anchovies!

After lunch, we did a kayaking activity. We had to transfer from the Zodiac to the kayaks in what I thought were pretty choppy conditions. Luckily, we all made it into our kayaks safely and headed off to explore the area. There were some pretty big waves but we managed to stay afloat. On the tour we saw a green sea turtle, some spotted rays and a pair of sea lions that swam around us. We won't run out and buy a kayak but it was another fun part of the adventure. 

Our final activity of the day was to visit a beach where there was a post office of sorts that dated back to the 1700s when whalers were in the area. It was a barrel where sailors could drop off letters to and from England with no postage required. When whalers came by they would pick up mail for the crew and leave letters for home. Homeward bound ships would take mail for their town and hand deliver it. The tradition persists and when you go, you can pick up mail to deliver when you get home. Marilyn added a post card addressed to us so we'll see how long it takes to arrive!