We would not normally be rushing around doing all this touring at once, but Scott wants to see as much as he can of the Galapagos before he flies out on Saturday.
So we signed up for a 'Sharksky' snorkel trip to see Kicker Rock. The cost was $50 each and this is a 2/3 day trip in a big outboard boat up the west side of San Cristobal, with several stops. This trip is also sold as a scuba trip for around $120 pp. But one of the dive shops we talked to said they were expecting large north swells, and the diving would be lousy.
They picked us up onboard promptly at 9am. The first stop was at Darwin Bay, where there is a big statue of Charles Darwin. This bay is supposedly where he first stepped ashore in the Galapagos.
Then we stopped at Las Tejorias, which is a Man-O-War bird nesting site. We could see the male birds with their big red throats.
The next stop was at Isla Lobo. Lobo Marino (which translates literally to Sea Wolf) is the local name for the sea lions. Isla Lobo is a Sea Lion breeding site, and also home to a bunch of marine iguanas. We got to snorkel along the island and swim with the sea lions and marine iguanas. Dave thinks he got some pretty good pictures of the sea lions swimming around us, and I might have gotten an iguana underwater, but our 'waterproof' camera took on some water, and we can't get it to turn on now. We have yet to find a reader that will read the proprietary Olympus chip, to at least get the pictures off.
After about an hour playing with the sea lions, we took off for our final stop, Kicker Rock. This is a huge rock sticking straight up out of the water, off the west coast of San Cristobal. If conditions are right, one can often see hammerheads there. On the way up, though, we saw a big whale jump. It turned out to be a mother and calf, swimming along. We never got a real good shot of them, but it was fun to travel with them for awhile. We're not sure what kind of whale it was... we thought at first it was a humpback, but they had tiny dorsal fins. While we were watching the whales, a manta ray also jumped out of the water nearby.
The conditions weren't great at Kicker Rock... the swell was large and crashing on the rock... the visibility was poor... the current was ripping... and the water was cold... But we went in anyway. We circled the rock in the boat first, and took pictures of the famous blue-footed boobies nesting on the rock. Then we snorkeled thru the big crack in the rock to the other side. It was a beautiful sunny day and nice to be out in the boat and snorkeling, even if conditions weren't perfect. We did not see any hammerheads (not necessarily a bad thing!).
We are doing so much running around that it's been hard to get enough internet to get our pictures organized and posted along with this dialog. We see lots of wifi signals on the boat, and there are rumors that there is supposed to be free wifi, but so far, we have not gotten any free wifi that worked. In San Cristobal, we ended up at the Mockingbird Cafe, up the street from Sharksky, that only charges $1.50 per hour for 'decent' internet. There are many other internet cafes, but that's the only one we found that actually had wifi.
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