Espanola Island
I woke up everyone at six in the morning when the sun was coming up over the horizon. It sounds early, but there was so much to see, hear and experience that there was no way I could let folks sleep in any longer. After an early breakfast, we went ashore to visit Española Island, an extraordinary island filled with wildlife. The Galápagos albatross have arrived! After a few months of leave, they’ve returned and are starting to populate the island, males and females looking for mates, blue-footed boobies courting, dancing and protecting eggs, Nazca boobies looking sleek, red-billed tropicbirds overhead with magnificent frigatebirds soaring, the royalty of the air.
The afternoon had us exploring the undersea world of Galápagos, and experienced snorkelers as well as the intrepid beginners saw what they may have never dreamed imaginable: large schools of razor surgeonfish, angelfish, damselfish, and the rulers of the undersea, the sharks. We had good looks at white-tipped reef sharks, timid and not really living up to the reputation humans have given them through the cinema. With our group who explored the rock off the beach, we found a cave of four to five small sharks sleeping under an overhang, just the beginning of an exciting “cirumsnorkel” of the small off-shore rock.
The afternoon finished with a daring interaction of Daniel and a dominant bull sea lion who decided that a pile of snorkeling gear was within his domain, and refused to release it into the hands of the owners. Piece by piece, our intrepid naturalist rescued the equipment, until the bull fell over with ennui into sleep, leaving us to abandon the beach at sunset in peace.
I woke up everyone at six in the morning when the sun was coming up over the horizon. It sounds early, but there was so much to see, hear and experience that there was no way I could let folks sleep in any longer. After an early breakfast, we went ashore to visit Española Island, an extraordinary island filled with wildlife. The Galápagos albatross have arrived! After a few months of leave, they’ve returned and are starting to populate the island, males and females looking for mates, blue-footed boobies courting, dancing and protecting eggs, Nazca boobies looking sleek, red-billed tropicbirds overhead with magnificent frigatebirds soaring, the royalty of the air.
The afternoon had us exploring the undersea world of Galápagos, and experienced snorkelers as well as the intrepid beginners saw what they may have never dreamed imaginable: large schools of razor surgeonfish, angelfish, damselfish, and the rulers of the undersea, the sharks. We had good looks at white-tipped reef sharks, timid and not really living up to the reputation humans have given them through the cinema. With our group who explored the rock off the beach, we found a cave of four to five small sharks sleeping under an overhang, just the beginning of an exciting “cirumsnorkel” of the small off-shore rock.
The afternoon finished with a daring interaction of Daniel and a dominant bull sea lion who decided that a pile of snorkeling gear was within his domain, and refused to release it into the hands of the owners. Piece by piece, our intrepid naturalist rescued the equipment, until the bull fell over with ennui into sleep, leaving us to abandon the beach at sunset in peace.
