We started our day early on a pre-breakfast activity in the morning, in search of cetaceans. We got lucky when our naturalist Pato spotted a small pod of common dolphins leaping and splashing off our starboard bow. Our first officer Ivan was at the ship’s helm, so he turned east and we followed these beautiful marine mammals for a short distance as they leapt towards the sunrise. We had amazing opportunities to photograph these magical creatures with beautiful sunrise light. Along our navigational route, viewing as we went, storm petrels, dark-rumped petrels and other sea birds were flying on the surface of the ocean searching for planktonic species.
After breakfast we all crowded into the bridge and crossed the Equator and did our celebration, dancing limbo across our yellow, red and blue ribbon as the “endemic Equator.” if you cross this by limbo dancing, you officially become a “shellback.”
We soon arrived to a nice protected bay of Isabela, and dropped anchor near the titan cliffs of Punta Vicente Roca, Isabela. This island is the largest of the archipelago; it’s over 4000 square kilometers of surface. We went on a Zodiac ride along the coast of this protected cove, and got lucky to spot many Galapagos penguins, flightless cormorants, sea lions and green Pacific sea turtles.
The water looked so clear and it was sunny; everything was showing us perfect conditions to jump in the water with our snorkel gear, so we did! It’s hard to describe the experience of swimming with so many sea turtles near you, flightless cormorants fishing and penguins swimming by like small torpedoes in the water.
After lunch, we had a dry landing on the youngest island in the archipelago. This is Fernandina, the most pristine of the enchanted islands. Once on the island, it feels like traveling back in time, to enjoy the Galapagos without much human impact. Our welcoming committee was hundreds of marine iguanas basking on top of each other, retaining body heat and digesting after sessions of diving into the ocean to scrape the green algae off the rocks in the shallow bottoms of the sea. Young sea lions were playing in the tide pools, and flightless cormorants were displaying their courtship and building nests on the dry shores on the smooth black lava fields. What an amazing day, visiting the two youngest islands of the Galapagos.
