Isabela & Fernandina Islands

At last! It is Wednesday today… and that means Punta Vicente Roca! I have been away from the islands for a long while (seven months to be exact!), as motherhood has taken me away from the ships I love, but I am back! Although I live here, the human settlements are a far cry from the magical wilderness of the more remote regions of the archipelago and of all the places I have missed, the one I dream about the most is Punta Vicente Roca. Our arrival here heralds our entrance into the western realm of the Galápagos, a land of young volcanoes, cool productive waters and the strangest wildlife one can find anywhere in the world! In fact, I never tire of saying that one has not really been to Galápagos unless one visits Isabela and Fernandina Islands.

My much-awaited morning started with an optional wake-up call, to invite National Geographic Islander travelers out on deck to look out for marine life. Although no cetaceans made their appearance at this point, we were delighted to be greeted by a spectacular sunrise over Wolf, the tallest of Isabela’s volcanoes and to count several species of sea birds, both resident and migratory, among our sightings.

After a countdown over the equator line, and a coastal navigation along a spectacular caldera exposed by the long-ago collapse of its outer wall, we dropped anchor at last at Punta Vicente Roca. The NG Islander officers rapidly lowered our fleet of Zodiacs, and we departed to explore a coastline that looked daunting and barren from afar, but on closer inspection turned out to be absolutely crawling with life – and what life!

Enormous, dragon-like marine iguanas were taking advantage of low tidal conditions to graze on algae and dive down into the water. Many of them were quite impressively coloured and behaving with great aggressiveness towards one another, as they were in the thrall of their breeding season – we even saw several full-out fights! Galápagos fur seals were frolicking in the water and among the rocks, hundreds of sea turtles were floating about, several locked in copulation, and a large groups of Galápagos penguins zoomed by as they hunted the tiny fish near the surface of the water.

All of a sudden our two-way radios blurted out “whale”! We all headed out into the open sea to see what we could find: a medium-sized Bryde’s whale surfaced several times, first the blow then the curving back and small falcate fin – just yards from where we looked on in delight!

On returning to the coast, some of us came across yet more giants of the deep: the huge oceanic sunfish in some cases, and a graceful manta ray for others. Along the coastline, blue-footed penguins, noddy terns and Nazca boobies looked curiously down at us, and we were lucky enough to encounter both the flightless birds of the Galápagos out on the rocks: the penguin and the flightless cormorant.

Giddy with all we had seen, we returned to the ship to get ready to join these wonderful creatures we had seen from above, and we jumped in the water for what turned out to be the absolute best snorkel outing one could possibly imagine: dozens of sea turtles, penguins, cormorants, sharks and rays drifted gracefully by, and hundreds of colourful reef fish flitted among the shallow rocks, set alight by the filtered sun rays. Probably the greatest highlight of the outing was watching how the slumbering green turtles just hung in the water column, allowing huge schools of angel and surgeon fish to clean them by grazing the algae off their carapaces.

We returned to lunch overflowing with all our new experiences, and still had the afternoon walking on the most pristine island in the world to look forward to! How great it is to be back in the field!