Day 2

A bad night for sleep - the seas were very rough and although no one was ill there were an awful lot of interruptions, with a lot of room swapping and not much slumber. The kids enjoyed the sensation of trying to walk and get breakfast with the ship moving so much.

Pics tell it all, tortoises (not often seen in the wild), californian sea lions, iguanas, crabs, herons, marine iguanas, finches, landed in Urvina Bay where the swell was quite severe - made for an exciting transfer from the ship to the zodiacs, walk where we saw land iguana, tortoise and loads and loads of finches and Darwin mocking birds Derry ended up leading the walk with the very matter of fact shout coming back to the main group from her of 'there's another iguana' - then snorkel - poor visibility, Dez managed to bring a lot of the beach back in her costume (black coarse sand) - back to boat messing by the pool after lunch, back out for long walk at 3.30pm , hot and tiring but kids handled it really well, on this walk we saw marine iguanas by the pile and loads of sea lions playing, suckling, sleeping - in fact I think we got a little blasé about the prevalence of the marine iguanas - they were so still and well camouflaged that we nearly stepped on them a couple of times. We were walking over black lava rock and we saw the 2 types - ah, ah (the type you can't walk on)and pee hu hu??(the flat rocks). We saw a heron catch a baby marine iguana, wash it off and eat it. Our naturalist/guide, Margoth, said that this species of heron is one of the only animals that washes their food before eating it. This was a dry landing by the mangroves. back to ship, barbeque on deck (Hugo is now Finn's mate!) another early night for Dez while Siena Finn and us watched the seals playing beside the ship in the ship's lights and then early bed for all of us!