Floreana

Had a great nights sleep – our airconditioning in our cabin was now working which made it much more pleasant.
Before breakfast we were out for a wet landing on a so called green beach at Punta Cormorant (didn’t look green to me in that light

although on close inspection the otrivine crystals were quite green). We had a welcoming committee of a friendly sea lion that swum up and invaded the group.

This was quite a theme of our landings - most places had a sea lion in the way, or an iguana impersonating a rock to greet us.

After being told the difference between organic volcanic beaches, we headed inland to see the salt water lagoon and the flamingos.

It was nice to be there so early before the other boats started trampling on top of us - we were still in the part of the archipelago that most boats visit, and so our guide was always conscous of getting us to places when others weren't there.

Baby flamingos are colourless as they have not ingested enough shrimp (and therefore beta carotene) to take on their distinctive colour. After admiring the flamingos in perfect silence, we headed up and over the hill to the white sand beach on the other side of the island.

Here we saw sting rays in the shallows, and lots of crabs on the rocky shores.

Here we also that that little known beast, the grumpy SS. For days now his new timberland wet shoes had been annoying him, resulting in nasty blisters on his heels. See the separate section for pictures of SS on his bottom, trying to adjust the shoes and reapplying plasters. This became a recurrent theme on the rest of our walks J.
Back to the boat for breakfast – the usual with a hot option of frittata. It was outside on deck fro a change as the weather was good, and this was nice in theory, but involved a lot of passing from one end to the other as opposed to the buffet set up downstairs. It also started to cause issues re the bread… funny how people in groups get annoyed about small things. In the bread basket were three types of bread – toast, yellowy rich bread (almost like brioche) and French baguettes. SS and I like brown bread, so I made a point of getting to breakfast early and bagging us each two slices. Unfortunately once we were having breakfast on deck, for some reason less bread was provided. And particularly less brown bread. By the last couple of days we were late to breakfast a couple of times, and so made do with yellow bread as the brown had gone. But this did not stop a couple of the others who had bagged the brown bread that day saying “Gee, it’s so nice to finally get some brown bread!” “Yeah, I was so tired of the other breads, but the brown always seemed to be gone” etc etc. Get a life people!!
The amusing thing at breakfast (I am so naughty) was when one of the men got excited to get up and take a picture of a pelican, and tried to climb over the back of the bench seat. His elbow somehow managed to connect very hard with the bottom of his wife’s drinking glass as she was taking a sip, and it cracked into her teeth with an audible loud clink. It would have hurt, but she was more furious than anything. Juice also went down her chin. Well, he was in the doghouse for the rest of the day, and she was quite a sourpuss to begin with. He rushed after her to try to apologise, but she sulked for the rest of the day, with him tiptoeing around her anxiously. Great holiday!

The boat moved again after breakfast up towards Devils Crown, and we had another snorkel at 9:30am. Notably this was the only snorkelling that our guide joined us on - he was fairly intrepid with lots of diving down under rocks etc. Not only was the water freezing, we realised after 5 minutes that the water was full of tiny jellyfish that constantly stung us like electric mosquitoes. So painful. I ended up with a rash down one leg! They even stung me on my chin. The snorkelling was good tho’, we saw our first turtles, and also a couple of sharks and other fish (parrot fish, sturgeons etc). We also saw a lot of Seastars (what used to be called Starfish, but since they are "echinoderms" have been renamed - sounds like a case of PCness gone awry to me!). SS again read his book, and was joined by now by the other non snorkelers – Eric from Holland and Sourpuss.

Good to see some unusual things, but I was quite happy to be back on the boat for a welcome back juice, dough balls, and a warm shower tho’.

Lunch was at midday – curried chicken, rice, ratatouille and salad followed by a passionfruit mousse which we skipped. We then had a break until 2pm and so had a snooze in the cabin.

At 2pm we headed to the post office barrel where we had a group photo taken.

We sorted through the barrel to see if there was any post we could deliver, but Croydon, Walthamstow and St Albans are hardly convenient, so we declined the great honour of delivering stuff. Pretty dull stop off as I had thought it would be. At least it was short – we were back on the boat at 2:30pm with lots of time off before dinner, as the boat had a long way to cruise that day again.

The boat got underway for isabela – the largest island. I finished reading my annoying book “My Fathers Island” by Johanna Angermeyer, which I donated to Kathy in return for her Melvyn Bragg. I started reading another book from the library onboard called the “Lake of Dead Languages” which was OK, and I finished that before leaving the boat. We sat upstairs, and the Sagitta put her sails up (which apparently makes about 0.5knots of difference to our floating barge’s speed) but we did get to see the Mary Anne in the distance sailing properly and looking beautiful. We also saw distant whale snorts which was exciting.

Dinner was downstairs and fish with salad, carrots and beans, yucca and rice, followed by a flan (which we skipped). The yucca was lovely in particular. Alex then gave us a talk about the inhabitants of Floreana in the 30’s (see separate entry on the Baroness).
We again went straight to bed after the talk – I slept like a log.