Punta Vicente Roca & Punta Espinosa
“Bridge, bridge, over.”
“Here the Bridge, good morning.”
“Good morning Bridge, there is some action a mile away, ahead on port side.”
“Roger, we’re heading to check it out.”
Is 05:58 in the morning, and the activities on board the National Geographic Islander have already started. Pretty soon a pod of approximately 800 common dolphins are all around us delighting every single soul on board for about an hour. Swimming in a huge circle, they seemed to have been following fish, always in the company of hundreds of sea birds.
Later on in the same morning, while riding along the cliffs of Punta Vicente Roca on northern Isabela Island, we experienced the most outstanding moment with a Bryde’s whale that not only stayed within range of the Zodiacs, but performed a shallow swim and even allowed me to take some footage with our underwater camera.
It is useless to say that everyone was, by that moment, expectant about the snorkeling. This was, by the way, marvelous with all the sea turtles sleeping, grazing or simply swimming and multitudes of multicolored fish.
It wasn’t necessary to keep going since the day was more than filled by now, but of course we kept going and the visit to Punta Espinosa on Fernandina Island wasn’t fruitless. Scores of marine iguanas were resting on top of the basalt while many more (females all of them) were fiercely kicking, pulling and pushing the sand; digging out to lay eggs. The marine iguana nesting season is more active than ever.
We have been getting reports about the presence of ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) with satellite photos and newspaper comments. However the animals in the Galápagos say otherwise. Everywhere birds are nesting and iguanas as well. The presence of plankton is by far impressive and today the temperature of the water was at least refreshing. El Nino, well… maybe we still need to see.
