Friday, March 11: San Cristobal Island

This morning one activity was the option to get up early and see the sun rise through the crack in Kicker Rock.  We decided to sleep a little longer and got out on deck a little late for the best photos, so the first one will be by one of the Flora Naturalist.

 Sun rising through the crack in Kicker Rock(F)

By the time I got my camera ready, the sun was a little above the rock, but I think it still made a good photo.

  Kicker Rock a little later

For the next hour or so, the Flora basically sailed very slow circles around Kicker rock so we could see it from all angles and in various lighting.  I’ll just include a couple more photos of the rock below.

 Kicker Rock from the other side

Besides the obvious split in the rock, there was another, much smaller crack about half way along the base that you could only see for a short time as we passed by.

  Can you see the other crack in Kicker Rock?

Shortly after leaving Kicker Rock, a pod of probably 20 or 30 Dolphins decided to join us for a while.

 One Dolphin rolling and one under the surface

It is very difficult to get good photos of swimming Dolphins, but perhaps this video of the Dolphins will give you a better idea of their number and activity.

I guess the Dolphins got bored with us and left after about 15 minutes.  We had a meeting that morning with some of the Celebrity staff to get more information about the Peru part of our trip.  It turned out that there would be 10 of us (5 couples) continuing on for the Peru land tour after the cruise.  We got some additional information about a change to the itinerary (more about that later) and the tour in general. 

After lunch we arrived at our primary destination for the day, San Christobal Island.  Here we had chosen to take the “long, steep, difficult hike and short time for optional swim”. 

 Approaching San Christobal: We started on the small beach.

We took a short tender ride on the way to the beach.  We were told that this would be a wet landing but they strongly recommended taking good hiking shoes for the climb and hike.  We put our hiking shoes in a bag and, after landing in the beach, changed into them.  It was probably a good thing.  With the Naturalist in the lead, we started up the very rocky trail.

 Can you see the trail up the hill?  It is there.

The first part of the hike/climb was pretty rough, but not as bad as our climb up to Lookout Point on Pigeon Island, St Lucia in December.  As we got higher, we started seeing some nice views.

 A nice view part way up the hill

I think one of the main reasons for visiting San Christobal was to get a chance to see the Red Footed Boobies.  Blue Footed Boobies are fairly common in the Galapagos, but you have to work harder to see the Red Footed variety.

A Blue Footed Boobie caring for its eggs.

Unfortunately, the Red Footed Boobies seemed to like to roost in the trees more than their blue footed cousins, so their red feet were hard to see.

  The red feet are barely visible, but there.

One interesting thing is that the Red Footed Boobies still have very blue beaks.  As we climbed and hiked the island, we could occasionally look back and see some people on the beach where we landed.

The people are looking at some sea lions also on the beach.

Besides the Boobies there were other birds and some colorful small lizards.

This guy was colorful and actually cute.

 This lizard was not so colorful.

On the way back down the trail, we encountered two Boobies very involved in a mating ritual. 

 The Boobie pair mostly ignored us.

They were prancing around and showing off to each other and didn’t seem to mind that we were watching.  We watched them from a respectable distance for probably 5 minutes and they just kept up their courtship “dance”, as you can see in this video of the Boobie courtship.  We left them, but other groups reported that they were still “dancing” 20 minutes later.

When we got back to the beach, the sea lions had attracted quite an audience, but were ignoring the people and enjoying taking a nice nap.

 Sea Lions were sacked out on the beach.

As planned, we skipped the swim part of the excursion and just headed back to the ship.  We did have a nice sunset that evening.

Sunset off of San Christobal Island

The Maître D’, Luis, had taken good care of us all week (well, except for taking us to the wrong cabin), so we gave him a bottle of “Flaming Gator Pepper Sauce” and got a photo of him with Susan.

 Susan and Maitre D’ Luis

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