The most wonderful thing we did in Galapagos was snorkeling in the clear waters. At Las Tintoreras, we had such a blast snorkeling with the sea lions! The playful sea lions absolutely love human company, and would swim so fast around us, blowing bubbles into our face, waving their flipper at us! How amazing is that! Plus, they look at you with such big round eyes, it made us almost want to hug them, but no, we weren’t allowed to touch them. There were at least ten sea lions in the area where we snorkeled, so almost everywhere we swam, we would encounter them. Many of them are almost as tall as us. We took videos of them underwater and some photos too.

It was such immense joy swimming with the playful and wild sea lions 

These sea lions are so playful in nature - they even picked up a tree branch and started playing with it among themselves.

Sea lions are not the only animals we encountered while snorkeling. In another spot, we snorkeled among a few white-tipped sharks and a large manta ray - another amazing experience. Plus, there were many colorful fish around too.

Grace looking out to sea

 The boat that took us here from Isabela island

 

Ah…Galapagos…the surprise doesn’t end. The Blue-footed Booby (Sula nebouxii excisa) is the bird one shouldn’t miss when visiting Galapagos. This booby has bright blue feet, and is such a beautiful bird. These large diving seabirds have dagger-like bills. We would usually see them flying in the air or diving into the sea in large numbers, but here around Las Tintoreras, we saw their nesting site. There are roughly 20,000 pairs of Blue-footed Boobies in the Galapagos, which is approximately half of the world’s population.

What’s spectacular to watch is their plunge diving into the sea to catch fish. We had never seen a bird diving straight into the water to catch fish before. The boobies are graceful when fishing in a flock and that is one of the main attractions of the Galapagos. They often start their dive from 15 meters or more and accelerate their dive by aiming towards the water before folding their wings and becoming arrow-like. We’ll show you the photos in another post.

Colonies of Blue-footed Boobies

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 4:56 am and is filed under Ecuador, Galapagos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.