The Sanderson Adventure Team: Genovesa Island

Having sailed overnight, we awoke on Monday morning anchored in Darwin Bay. The bay is actually the caldera of a collapsed volcano that has been engulfed by the sea. The bay is surrounded by tall vertical rock walls, the rim of the old volcano.

We started our day by boarding the pangas and going ashore for a morning hike. Pangas are what the locals call the motorized rubber dinghies we use for shore landings. The Flamingo 1 is too big to get close to shore so we drop anchor in deep water and use the pangas on all of our excursions.

The Galapagos are famous the Blue Footed Booby, a large marine bird with blue feet. There are actually three types of booby that live in the Galapagos, the blue footed, the red footed and the Nazca. The rarest form is the Red Footed Booby, and Genovesa Island is one of the few places that they can be seen. We saw many of them flying and nesting in trees. We also saw some great examples of Frigate Birds, another large marine bird. The male frigate has a distinctive red throat pouch that it can puff up to make himself appear more attractive to females.

We also saw sea lions up close, including a baby sea lion that was just a couple of weeks old.

We enjoyed a brief swim and snorkel on the beach before heading back to the boat for lunch.

After lunch, we tried our first “deep water” snorkel. Deep water snorkeling means that we enter the water in deep water from the pangas, rather than swimming out from the beach. We spend the afternoon snorkeling along the rock walls of the bay. The volcanic crater that forms the bay has very steep sides so the fish and other marine life are mostly concentrated along the walls where there is some underwater structure. Just a few more feet away from the walls and the water depth drops to several hundred feet and in the middle is over 1000 ft deep.

Later we went for a short hike. We got to the top of the wall via some natural steps and then walked through low trees where we saw many nesting Nazca Boobies and their down-covered young. The highlight of the evening was seeing several very rare Short-Eared Owls. We returned to the boat on the pangas as the sun set over the edge of the crater walls. What a spectacular day in the Galapagos!