The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

After SCUBA we hiked out to Tortuga Bay. It is a 45 minute hike. 30 minutes out to the beach, and then 15 more minutes to get to the bay. The beach was very pretty with extremely fine white sand.

It has many crabs.

And little shrimpy things in the tide pools.

And crab tracks.

This is the hole of a ghost crab. They make tiny balls of sand outside of his hole. But they disappear into their holes really fast.

There were also these tracks.

Which belong to the marine iguanas.

They do not camouflage very well in the pale sand. But they are hard to see on the lava rocks.

The bay at the end was also very pretty.

We were exhausted after SCUBA, so we tried to go to a beach where we could crash and watch the wildlife. Unfortunately we confused the “swimming” symbol on the map with the “beach” symbol. But we decided it was good enough.

There actually wasn’t much wildlife either. There are supposed to be baby sharks and rays in the lagoon, and the water was certainly clear enough to watch them, but we didn’t see any.

There weren’t even very many birds. This is ghost bird. Now you see him.

Now you don’t!

Here he is again.

This is crabby one claw.

And that’s pretty much all we saw!

Because we hadn’t been diving in a while, we started with 2 easy beginner dives in Punta Estrada and Loberia before attempting the stronger currents in the rest of the Galapagos. We saw a number of different fish. Some of the small ones were hanging out in the rocks.

The bigger ones were more out in the open.

There were many pencil urchins at these sites and something was growing on all the spines.

We saw pencil urchins growing inside a clam shell. We saw a number of clam shells but never any live clams.

There were several types of starfish. These ones had stubby arms and were a strong yellow with spikes.

Occasionally there were outgrowths on the rocks, some very delicate and white, others grew as these small fans.

We saw our very first white tipped reef shark.