Floreana Island

Turquoise blue waters, 80 degrees temperatures, and a nice breeze. That is how we started our day, snorkeling at Champion Islet off Floreana. We jumped in this amazingly clear water to discover thousands of fish right underneath the surface, tons of different schools of all different colors sizes and shapes. There were the beautiful king angelfish, some silvery ones like the dusky chub and grunts as well as some much larger parrotfish that had a unique shade of turquoise and orange. We saw some sharks swimming around the reef as well as sea lions that would come straight at our faces throwing bubbles or would start nibbling on our fins. It was just an amazing experience and we didn’t even have to worry about moving on, as the current was gently taking us around the island. All you’d do is enjoy the spectacular undersea wildlife.

After coming back onto the boat to get changed and put some dry clothes on, we headed back to the same place, but this time with our cameras to be able to catch a few shots of the elusive Charles mockingbird that was actually flying from one cactus to the other.

We came back for lunch and a bit of a rest before heading back on shore for our afternoon adventure on Punta Cormorant on Floreana Island. We landed on a greenish sand beach that gets the color from the little olivine crystals that you find in the sand. After relaxing at the beach for an hour we went off for a short walk to visit a flamingo lagoon located right behind the beach. I think we might have had more than a hundred flamingoes, which is a BIG number for these islands. We continued our walk to a white sand beach where we could observe about two dozen sea turtles, all gathered up just offshore except for a couple of them that were actually right on shore so we did actually have a great opportunity to observe this unique animal that was probably waiting for night time to come lay her eggs up the beach.

We finished our walk right by sunset and we had some unique colors in the sky that just made our day finish in absolute heaven!