Española Island
A sunny day with clear skies and calm water was a great way to start the week. Today Española Island’s Gardner Bay, Gardner Islet, and Suarez Point were the planned national park visiting sites. Our program gave us the chance to explore the island in different ways since we organized kayaking outings, nature walks and deep-water snorkeling.
After our breakfast we had a talk about all the aquatic activities planned for the day. This was followed by our deep-water snorkeling, the visibility and the light we had were perfect for this activity, so our guests had an amazing moment snorkeling among sea lions, big schools of fish and sting rays.
The beach at Gardner Bay was a popular spot, too. Our guests enjoyed walking and swimming here. We found nearly 60 sea lions and snapped photos of them as well as the green sea turtles that were swimming in shallow waters nearby.
Kayaking gave us a wonderful chance to explore the coastal ecosystem of Gardner Bay. We saw a great variety of seabirds and exercised a bit kayaking back to the ship.
In the afternoon we dropped the anchor at Suarez Point and immediately climbed into our fleet of Zodiacs to go ashore. Our objective was to get to the cliffs of Suarez Point in order to see the endemic waved albatross, we succeeded finding a couple of dozen of the last albatross, soon they will all migrate from Galápagos. Besides finding the albatross we came across a great diversity of species, especially land birds and seabirds. We saw Nazca boobies, blue-footed boobies, red-billed tropic birds, plus Darwin’s finches and Galápagos hawks, which were the highlights.
We all felt fortunate to be on an island that has such a great degree of endemism, the species found here won’t be seen outside the Enchanted Islands.
