Floreana Island
We anchored at dawn in the mirror calm waters of Post Office Bay, Floreana. This is an island with a long and interesting human history, and those who went to shore before breakfast with the naturalists learned how a hand delivery – mail swap tradition was established here in the 1790’s. This system has been used ever since by sailors, whalers, sealers, eccentric yachtsmen and now guests on boats and ships currently touring the islands. We left our cards and took those that we could deliver once we returned home.
A breakfast of Eggs Benedict and smoked trout gave us the energy we needed for first a Zodiac cruise, and then a marathon snorkel outing along the shores of Champion Islet just offshore and to the east of the main island of Floreana. All four of the Zodiacs, with our guests and a Naturalist in each, were able to find several of the endemic and rare Floreana mockingbirds and we all spotted red-billed tropic birds in their cliffside nests, too.
This morning’s snorkeling was fantastic! We slid into the choppy current on the south exposed side of the islet among huge school of hundreds, even in some cases thousands, of fish of more than a dozen different species. They were gobbling invisible food particles that the current had carried in and we marveled at their colors and endless variety. Three white-tipped reef sharks swam below us, sea lions checked us out briefly and then went on their way, and we spied blue sea stars, chocolate chip sea stars and thousands of pencil sea urchins attached to the rocks. We swam on and on around the island and near the end discovered four slipper lobsters. A few of the die hard snorkelers returned to the starting spot where all the fish were, and we jumped in there again. Four large white-tipped reef sharks came along, I saw a big marbled sting ray and everyone admired a pair of lovely Moorish idols.
Back on the National Geographic Islander we helped ourselves to an abundant lunch buffet, shopped at the ship’s Global market and took a siesta. Two rounds of kayakers paddled our bright canary yellow boats along the coast and enjoyed sightings of turtles, boobies and even flamingoes in flight! We all got to see the flamingoes in the brackish lagoon at Punta Cormorant on the late afternoon walk. They were close to the trail so we got great photos, and everyone delighted in the bright color of these native Galápagos birds. Imagine – flamingos and penguins in the same islands! Galápagos is indeed a unique and special place!
Our afternoon was completed with a stroll along a fine white sand beach where the sea turtles were waiting in the surf for night to fall so they could come on shore to nest. Naturalist Aura counted 16 fresh tracks from the 8 females that had nested – or at least tried to nest – the night before. We have been gathering nesting and census data on sea turtles for two years and this data is turned over to the Charles Darwin Research Station for analysis.
