It was an extremely bumpy night, as we had been warned. I rolled with the waves until 2 a.m., getting very little sleep. I kept waking myself up thinking I was falling out of bed. After breakfast we were onto the beach at Española to share with the sea lions. We spent two hours takin pictures and watching the sea lions sleep and play. We had to be careful of the bulls but even they were fairly docile.
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| Sea Lions of Espanola |
Snorkeling
After that we grabbed a quick snack and donned wet suits for an hour and a half snorkeling adventure. We saw a conch, starfish, a stingray, sea cucumber, anomonea, lots of fish, and two playful sea lions. The water was VERY cold but Kyra and I made it for the full swim. Graciela made a list of the fish of the Galapagos for us, 23 percent of the fish are endemic to the area. We saw the following fish on our first snorkeling adventure: King angelfish, panamic sergeant major, cardinal fish, moorish idol, hieroglyphic hawk fish, flag cabrilla, large banded blenny, pacific creolefish, yellow tailed surgeonfish, and streamer hogfish. After snorkeling we headed off to lunch and we spotted two humpback whales!
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| Snorkeling on Espanola |
Birds Everywhere
After lunch we all took a siesta as the boat moved to another part of the island. We spent nearly 3 hours walking around checking out very colorful marine iguana, sea lions (of course), blue-footed boobies (~4 of them), nazca boobies, albatros, mocking birds, galapagos doves, galapagos hawks, and white birds with long tails. As we arrived the male (bull) sea lion was very unhappy with us and barked liked crazy. We went around 2 females and saw our first marine iguanas from this island. They were big and black and red. They were all over the place. They also spit sometimes - to get rid of the salt they extracted from the water. We also saw very young sea lions, maybe 3 weeks old. Further in the island we saw blue-footed boobies on a nest, but they were 2 of just a handful that we saw, which was unexpected. We did get to see a ton of nazca (masked) boobies. They were very cool and you could be very close to them. We also saw the waved albatross - one had a baby and the others were communicating quite loudly. We saw birds with beautiful long tails that I had an impossible time taking pictures of, a galapagos hawk, and galapagos doves.
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| Birds of Espanola |
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