snorkeling around the Pinnacle again Friday, January 1 2016
location: between Chinese Hat and Santiago Islands, Galapagos, Ecuador
Chinese Hat is a volcano cone off the southeast corner of Santiago Island. It's rather similar to Punta Cormorant on Floreana Island, except its lava flows no longer attach it to its larger neighbor, and sea water flows through the gap between them. But if these straits were to be cut off on both ends, the resulting salt-water lagoon might become home to hundreds of flamingos.
This morning, we took a panga ride to the west side of Chinese Hat and executed a wet landing on a small beach. From there, we walked south, stopping for long periods to watch the many sea lions, many of which were young babies. This was yet another sea lion nursery, and I managed to shoot enough video to use up all the internal storage in Gretchen's Android smartphone. (You have probably noticed that I haven't been posting many pictures. In previous days, Gretchen and I had decided to try to enjoy the wildlife without worrying so much about taking pictures, which plenty of others in our group were doing anyway.) On the panga ride before the walk, James had told us that the fresh-looking lava along the Santiago shore was 100 years old, but later Hernan explained the difference between the young-looking lava and the older-looking lava with cactus growing on it as a consequence of the younger-looking lava having recently been under the sea. In this case, James' explanation made much more sense than Hernan's.
Later, we grabbed our snorkeling gear and pangas carried us to the southern end of the strait on the Santiago side. From there, we snorkeled northward, investigating caves and small inlets for sharks (none of which I saw). I was wearing my flippers but not my wetsuit, and I found that without the wetsuit's buoyancy I could no longer fix my mask and snorkel while out in the open water. One would think those huge flippers could have developed the propulsive force to hold me high enough in the water to be able to execute this task, but evidently not. So I had to rely once more on using the rocks to fix my equipment whenever it started to fail. In terms of observations, I saw a great many fat starfish and a new kind of bulbous-headed parrotfish with Mike-Tyson-style markings on the face near the outside corner of each eye. Supposedly there were penguins nesting in the lavatubes along the shoreline, but nobody saw any.
After the snorkeling, the Letty hosted its final kayak activity of the week, and yet again Gretchen and I somehow managed to get a kayak. We paddled out over the terrain we'd just been snorkeling in, and when we attempted to paddle across the strait to the Chinese hat side, Hernan told us we couldn't because it was a protected sea lion nursery. As we were returning to the Letty in our kayak, the others in other kayaks were moving too slowly for Hernan's liking, so he gave some of them a tow using his panga. He also towed a few of the kids through the water without any kayaks, an experience that seemed to be, for them, the highlight of their week.
Over lunch, Gretchen and I had a conversation in which we explained why we use Facebook, and how it facilitates the maintenance of our real social networks. It also makes possible things that weren't possible in the past, such as cold-calling distant friends and requesting a place to stay while visiting their town. Such requests aren't considered gauche in the world of Facebook (at least according to Gretchen). Gretchen's father had been on Facebook briefly, and in that time, an old high school classmate had sent him a message telling about what he'd been doing for the last fifty-some years. Apparently the highlight of his life had involved something about a NASCAR car. By way of reply, Gretchen's father told his old classmate about becoming a doctor, working for the Peace Corps in Africa, and then working for the Public Health Service. Suffice it to say, it was a picture of a much fuller life, and it was a hard story to tell without seeming like he was bragging, especially in comparison to a guy whose life's highlight involved a NASCAR car. After that, Gretchen's father didn't hear anything for a month or so. And then his old classmate wrote to say he had diabetes. Shortly thereafter, Gretchen's father learned that his old classmate had died. It wasn't long after that that Gretchen's father gave up using Facebook for good.
Early this afternoon, the Letty arrived at Bartolomé Island after a nine-mile sail northward along the Santiago coast. Bartolomé is the place with the famous leaning rock ("the Pinnacle") you might have seen on postcards. Ten years ago, I'd had perhaps my best snorkel ever at the base of that rock while Gretchen tried out scuba diving for the first time. Today we landed on the beach just east of the leaning rock and then we went snorkeling out around the Pinnacle. The underwater landscape there is much more complicated than it looks from the surface, with a jumble of massive boulders lying at various depths, with a few of them sticking out above the surface. It's full of nooks and crannies to explore. And the fish are incredible. Near the rocks, that move about as multi-individual superorganisms, while out from the rocks where the bottom consists of patterned sand, there are highways of slow-moving fish in knots of different numbers and species stretching out to the limits of visibility. I saw more of those Mike Tyson Parrotfish, one of which I pointed out to Gretchen when I came across her. Unfortunately, the sea beneath the Pinnacle was a lot more crowded with people than it had been the last time I'd visited ten years ago. At one point I even collided with someone. Still, there are things to be gained by paying attention to where the people congregate. I saw a woman swimming on her back about six feet below the surface filming something on the surface. It was a penguin, and it was mobbed by tourists. It broke out of their circle and headed over my way, swimming leisurely past me only a couple feet away, looking a little like a black and white chicken.
While the highlight of snorkeling at the Pinnacle ten years ago had been swimming with large numbers of sea lions, today there were none in the water at all. The only ones I saw were a few adults relaxing in stone niches to the Pinnacle's east.
On my way back to the beach east of the Pinnacle, I somehow got trapped in a shallow rocky area. It was too rough and wavy to walk in, but it was also too shallow to swim in. So I crawled along, mostly making progress when a wave temporarily deepened the water. Somewhere in there, I came upon my first Hieroglyphic Hawkfish hidden beneath a blade of lava.
Not long after making it to the beach, my mother-in-law told me she'd seen a six foot shark and expressed concern about her husband and daughter (my father-in-law and wife), who were still over in the bay west of the Pinnacle. I wasn't concerned; for one thing, our snorkeling was being closely overseen by the panga guys. And for another, even the most vicious species of sharks are a lot less deadly than cars. Or swimming pools. Or American gun policy. Besides, I knew from the last time we were here that most of the sharks of Bartolomé are across the isthmus in the bay on the island's south side.
My mother-in-law's concern eventually caused the panga drivers to herd the rest of the Letty's swimmers back to the beach, where we were being entertained by an adorable little penguin chasing a school of fish.
On the panga ride back to the Letty, we pulled up briefly to look at a penguin that was preening itself on the lava at 0.284185S, 90.555561W.
In the late afternoon, we went on another panga ride to Bartolomé, stopping to look at penguins just west of the Pinnacle along the way. Perhaps because all the snorkelers were gone, we quickly came upon three penguins. Two were on a rock and one was paddling around slowly on the surface. Ultimately our panga dropped us off at a dry landing at a cape coming off the northwest corner of Bartolomé. From there, a long wooden walkway led to the highest point of the island, the place where people like to snap that postcard picture of the Pinnacle. What with the rough swaths of lava, smooth tracts of soil, and creepy leafless silvery bushes that almost seemed to glow, the landscape looks like something created to represent an alien planet. Indeed, according to our guide James, the movie Master and Commander had been shot here, and in return the production company paid for a massive expansion of the wooden walkway so as to protect the fragile soil from all the tourists waddling to the overlook. Because of the wooden walkway, I could once more dispense with my shoes. The most surprising participant in the walk was my 71 year old father-in-law, who has a bad back and mostly avoids large changes of elevation on foot. But James was good about giving us breaks along the way at the various overlooks and that place where kids pretend they're super strong by lifting huge pieces of pumice. From one of the lower overlooks, it was possible to see all the way to Genovesa, 57 miles to the northeast (and on the other side of the equator).
During the entire walk to the top, Josh (the Bar Mitzvah kid) was asking Gretchen about her veganism and how to arrange an enjoyable and nutritious vegan diet for himself, particularly given his daily grind in a public high school. Gretchen was full of information and eager to help, though by the top she seemed just as eager to do something else, even if it meant participating in numerous group photos. As always, Hernan had brought his fancy camera equipment, and he orchestrated lots of photos, including one where all the children jumped in unison. Josh was feeling a little too adolescent and disaffected for such coerced kiddie jocularity, a feeling both Gretchen and I could relate to.
I should mention that the top of Bartolomé was so crowded with other tour groups that it was hard to take a picture that didn't include strangers.
Back on the Letty, I learned that Gretchen had been erasing the photos I'd been taking of the whiteboard (which held each day's itinerary), evidently unaware that the reason I'd been taking those pictures was to help me reassemble the order of events when the time came to write about it all. Once again my desire to hoard (in this case, to hoard information) was up against Gretchen's desire to declutter and simplify. Later, though, during the evening briefing, Gretchen discovered that Helen had also been taking pictures of the whiteboard. All we'd have to do would be to exchange email addresses. Still, this would add a layer of human interaction to a process that so easily could have been human-free, meaning I might never get the pictures. [But I'm by nature a pessimist and a worrier; in the end Helen did send the pictures, though by then I would have used clues such as notes I'd taken along the way, image datestamps, and Google satellite photos to correctly reconstruct the order of events.]
Dinner tonight was particularly dismal for the likes of Gretchen and me. It was actually worse for Gretchen, since it began with an eggplant-with-tomato sauce appetizer, and Gretchen hates eggplant. But then the main course was acorn squash, something neither Gretchen nor I can really eat (I can eat it when it's part of something else, but not when it's more-or-less served on its own). So we picked the potatoes out of it and maybe had some nuts. In all fairness to the Letty's kitchen staff, there's no way they could have known that we're vegans who don't eat squash.
Sea lions (and at least one Sally Lightfoot Crab) at Chinese Hat.
A baby sea lion at Chinese Hat. Click to enlarge.
Me with a penguin in the background just west of The Pinnacle.
Looking past the ragged edge of the Pinnacle towards the Letty and its sister ships (I can't tell which is which). Click to enlarge.
Looking down at others on the wooden walkway across the alien terrain of Bartolomé. Click to enlarge.
The famous view of the Pinnacle from the top of Bartolomé. Click to enlarge. And compare it to this picture I took on January 30th, 2005: