After our very rough crossing, we are happy when we arrive at Isla Bartolome at 2:30 in the morning and we can try to get some sleep, before we are up before 6 AM to go diving. The boat moves once again around 5:30 AM to take us to our dive site - it is nice how they cater to just to the only two divers on board. The one blessing we have from getting up so early to dive is that we get to observe the wonderful sun rise this morning.
Dive #7: Cousins Island (near Isla Bartolome): We are ready to jump into the zodiac once the boat arrives at the nearby cousins islands. It is a small island and we are able to almost completely circle the island under water during our dive. The rock was covered with yellow black coral and there were tons of fish every where. We dove on a wall that alternated between overhangs and steep slopes. We go and check out what may be hiding under the overhangs. There were turtles all over the place - we saw one just about every minute on the dive. It felt like they would swim in out of the blue and check us out and then slowly swim back into the blue. One was huge. Another turtle came between us and our dive master, Solon, and appeared to be considering whether to try to mate with him. This is mating season and turtles will do some strange things at this time, including trying to mate with divers and other male turtles. In the latter third of the dive we were literally surrounded by fish and they blocked out our view of the rocks and the surface. There was also a huge school of barracudas that circled above and around us. They hung around with us for the rest of the dive.
Once we were back on the Tip Top III, it cruised back to Isla Bartolome and anchored. We had showered and eaten by the time we were to begin our shore excursion. We took the pangas to the island where we had a dry landing on a nice little rock pier. This is one of the younger islands in the Galapagos and we get a chance to observe how life is beginning here. There is not so much plant life and the only land animals are grasshoppers, lizards and snakes. The lizards eat the grasshoppers, the snakes eat the lizards and the lizards are eaten by the hawks - a very simple food chain! There are some small bushes and a few small cactuses scattered around the barren volcanic "soil".
We walk up to the summit of the island at 114 meters where we are treated to what must be one of the best views in the Galapagos. We look over the spit of Bartolome that juts towards Isla Salvador with the Pinnacle Rock proudly jutting up (it is now a bit more dramatic after the US Navy used it for target practice in the Second World War).
We wander back down the trail to the pier, where we observe two Galapagos penguins swimming in the sea. This is the only place you will find penguins so far away from Antarctica - they are sustained by the cold waters brought in by the Humboldt current. We have to head back to the boat to get ready for our second dive.
Dive #8: Punta Martinez, Isla Bartolome: We dove off of one of the points on Isla Bartolome. The underwater lanscape was amazing. We had walls, slopes, overhangs, caverns, tunnels and crevices. We swam along, into and through all of them that we could find. There was lots and lots of the yellow black coral with small fish swimming through them. The highlight of this dive was all the turtles - they popped out from all over the place. Many seemed to be cruising in to see what we were up to. We saw one stingray.
After lunch we enjoyed another siesta before the afternoon's activities. We go ashore at Sullivan Bay on the nearby island of Isla Salvador (Santiago or James) to walk on the lava flow. It is a dry landing and we follow a two km trail around the century old lave flow that reached the sea. There are a few colonizing plants that can be observed.
The highlight of the walk, however, is the wild patterns that formed when the lava cooled. The surface is not yet eroded, so that are as clear as when they were formed. They are so many and they are so strange that it seems like a group of mad modern artists set up a colony here and got to work on the black material. It is hard to describe all the different shapes and patterns.
At one point we saw where the lave flow came up against an existing lava formation that had turned brown/reddish and was very granular. The contrast was glaring. We then walked through this older formation that had now become an island in the larger, more recent black flow before returning to the black lave flow. It was like a Martian landscape. We the completed the circuit, coming back to where the pangas will pick us up. While we waited we enjoyed the view of Bartolome and the Pinnacle Rock.
Once the pangas pick us up we go for a ride around Bartolome looking for penguins and other animals. We are quite fortunate - we find quite a few penguins. We even get a close look at one. He has perched himself on a rock that is now, at low tide, too high for him to jump into the water. As we cruise along the rocks, we noticed some things that should not be there - a plastic coke bottle, yellow toothbrush and some nylon rope. We pull up to the rocks and the guide jumps ashore to pick it up. We have seen very little litter on our trip so far and this junk just stood right out.
Once back on the boat we enjoy the sunset before dinner. Over dinner, we watch the nearly full moon rise over Bartolome. We are off to bed early - need to catch up on the sleep we missed last night.