The boat cruises over night to our next destination - Cerro Brujo on Isla San Cristobal (Chatham) - arriving just before breakfast at 7 AM. After breakfast we jump into the pangas to head to shore. This is a wet landing and we spend the morning walking on a beautiful white sand beach that is interspersed with mounds of black volcanic rock.
There is a large colony of sea lions here, and they are laying all over the beach. We wander up the beach and it is a bit like a slalom course as we weave between the sea lions - who seem to spend all their time sleeping on the beach (other than the dominant male, who spend all his time patrolling his stretch of beach). We have a great view out to Kicker Rock, where we will go diving later today.
In our walk we come upon this small 3 to 4 month old sea lion pup laying on the beach. His neck looks a bit odd and on a closer inspection, we notice that he has a string around its neck. It has grown into the string and we can see how it is cutting into the flesh (and most likely into its skull bone as it grows). We call over Lennie, the tour guide, and it is agreed that we need to cut it off or he will die. So we find a towel and Lennie and Solon, our dive master, corner the small pup and after a bit of a struggle are able to cut it off. A cheer from the crowd and the pup waddles away to its mother. He seems happier and when we go by him later he seems, at least to our eyes, grateful.
There are lots of Sally lightfoot crabs running around on the beach and Jacqui tries to catch one, but no luck. As we wander back to the pangas, we wade in the surf and one of the pups comes up and follows as we go. He was very cute.
The pangas take us back to the boat, where the engines are fired up so that we can head over to Kicker Rock. It is a short ride and on the way over we get ready for our dive.
Dive #2: Kicker Rock: This is an amazing rock formation in the middle of the sea. There is a slash right through the middle. We dive on the right side and it is a wall dive - the cliff face carries on right down through the water. We drift along this wall. The visibility was not that great, but we saw so many fish everywhere. Quite a few Galapagos sharks cruised by us - one group had over 10 sharks in it. A small school of barracuda swam by above us. There was not too much current. We swam along the wall all the way to the slash in the rock. The temperature ranged from 19-22°C - it was quite chilly.
We are back on the boat shortly after 11 AM and the boat the cruises around the whole island and we get a close look from all directions. Smaller boats can cruise through the split, but our boat is too big to do that. We then head onto our next destination - Isla Lobos. While cruising there we have lunch on board.
Isla Lobos is appropriately named - it is filled with sea lions. Before we go ashore, we go for a snorkel. They drop us a bit of a way down from the boat and we slowly swim back up along the rocks. At first we find nothing, but as we get a bit closer, we start to see the sea lions zipping by us in the water. At first just a few, but then they started coming from all directions. It was mainly the pups and the females. They would come up to us and then zip away. At times they would stare into our face for a short time. It was amazing how they could move under water - twisting and turning. They were so fast. We also saw one of the marine iguanas underwater eating the algae off the rocks and then swim back to shore, swishing its tail from left to right. It was quite graceful. He then climbed up onto a rock and stared back at us.
We get back on the boat (where there was one sea lion pup playing under the boat) and wash up before going ashore. It is a dry landing and once we are ashore (we had to chase them away from the landing platform), we are surrounded by sea lions. They are every where and are hiding from the hot sun under whatever shade they can find. Lots of pups have recently been born and they are all over the place. In fact, we found a very recent sea lion placenta.
There were many blue-footed boobies all over the place, many with eggs or chicks. we often had to wander off the trail to avoid the ones who had set up home on the trail itself. We found one three month old blue foot with a broken wing - unfortunately he will not last for long. There were a number of baby giant frigate birds, along with quite a few marine iguanas soaking up the suns.
We get back on the boat at 3:30 PM and the boat heads on to our next destination, namely Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the capital of the Galapagos province. We get there at 4:20 PM and go ashore shortly thereafter. The main attraction here is an interpretation center that they have recently built. It is quite well done and it provides quite a bit of history on the islands. There have been quite a few people that have tried to settle here (including a group of Norwegians), but not with too much success. The conditions are much to tough. The saddest part was to read about how much damage has been done to the islands over the years (for example, the whalers alone took over 100,000 Galapagos tortoises as food).
After we had finished with the museum, we wandered into town. It is a very basic place and as it was a Sunday, nothing was open. So once we had gathered at the pier, the zodiac came and took us back to our boat.
That night we had an excellent dinner of lobster that we had picked up fresh from a fishing boat the day before. The cook prepared it simply, but well. Once again, we retired early to the cabin as we need to be up early for our dive. The boat lifts the anchor and moves on at midnight while we sleep.