We woke early this morning and headed out pre-breakfast for a photo expedition. It was a lovely morning except for the mosquitoes (which were an unfortunate trend all day). We saw lots of tracks from turtles coming ashore overnight to lay eggs. Amazingly, some of the tracks came ashore and did a loop without laying eggs, presumably to come back in later to find a better place. The tracks carpeted the beach, all from the night before - there must have been thousands of eggs under the sand…
We walked along the beach for a couple miles taking pictures and playing the whole way. Sara quite enjoyed paying in the beach and running with Angela in the surf. It was yet another day where Sara came back to the boat with a half pound of sand in her swimsuit… I especially like the last two pictures - Sara was confused and she passed it along to Grandma Joan… :)
Caught these great photos of a booby flying right along the water. I’ve been practicing getting photos of fast moving animals on my camera and I always end up with pictures that are slightly out of focus. I think I did ok on these.
More of Darwin’s finches and mocking birds. This is another bird that’s really hard to get just right - especially shots of them in action!
Lots of ghost crab holes on the beach - they are very shy and require a lot of patiences to get them on camera. I wan’t able to get any close up picures, but I had a couple that were ok.
About halfway down the beach we saw a pair of turtles mating. It’s not a particularly graceful act, but it did bring the full circle of the mating process with the eggs being laid overnight. The males have notches in their fins to grab onto the females shell and then they just sort of bob in the water, basically tumbling in the waves.
We came back for breakfast and then out for a long snorkel near some cliffs/caves.
Sara had some trouble with her mask and we tried a two piece mask for a minute before going back to the full face mask. She ended up getting out of the water early with grandpa Jim because she kept getting water in her eyes. The full face mask did it’s job though and it was cool that she was able to snorkel on this trip - but it will be time for a real mask when she gets home.
We saw another large manta ray in the water. This one was a little smaller than the last one we saw and we weren’t able to see it nearly as clearly given the cloudy water.
You can really see from these videos just how fast they are. I was kicking at full speed and one little flick of the very end of their wings and they were gone.
And another one
Watching some blue tangs feed in a large school.
I saw another sea lion and got to swim with it for a bit (no video this time, Angela had the gopro). Angela missed the sea lions again but don’t worry, she got her chance later in the trip. It started to rain near the end of our snorkeling trip and it made for some very cool pictures.
After seeing how proud Angela and I were of all the photos we took, Sara wanted to take a few. These were the best ones from the boat on the way back from the snorkel.
We came back for lunch and went to a beach for snorkeling and a hike after lunch. The snorkeling wasn’t great as the water was cloudy, but it was a good opportunity to get Sara’s confidence back after her trouble in the morning. The hike was short and ended at a set of grottos (collapsed lava tubes filled with sea water) where we saw a dozen or so fur seals hanging out.
I think this one might have been broken… :)
Sara got another opportunity on this hike to play with all of her friends.
Hard to pass up the opportunity to take some more pictures of the Sally Lightfoot crabs. The last pictures is cool of a crab that was freshly moulted - so it was still growing it’s new shell. Apparently this can take a while and they have to be extra careful to hide deep in cracks/under rocks while it’s growing.
This heron looked like it was having a bad hair day. I can’t remember the name, but it was indicative of how scraggly it was.
The hike back was beautiful with a red hazy sunset. I’m still learning the settings on my camera so I didn’t get any great pictures of the sunset. I think I did ok on pictures of the wildlife though.