.... snorkel time ....

this is a pic of my family right before we left n seymour and its bountiful wildlife .... i think north seymour was my favorite island because the wildlife (boobies, frigates, giant lizards, iguanas, sealions, snakes) was so plentiful .... as a photo safari goes, it was like shooting fish in a barrel ... so many close choices .... 

 behind us in that picture, you can see daphne major and daphne minor .... my two favorite islands that i'll never visit! .... they are scientific sites for the study of birds and a menacing non scientist like me isn't allowed to go there ... but they are easy islands to identify from afar, and i read so much about them that i love them very much ... plus i like the name daphne (a la scooby doo, though i prefer the character of velma ) .....

leaving north seymour, we took our panga back to our boat ... sophie and i (as always) were on the first boat .... one man had asked to swim back to the boat (it was super hot) .... the most real reason that he wasn't allowed to swim back to the boat was because we were not at an approved swim/snorkel/dive site ... we were only at an approved national park land site .... and there were two fellows in uniforms with guns on a boat checking licenses .....so not a good time to break a rule .... but, alejandro said, no, can't swim ... the man said why ... and alejandro said too many sharks ... BIG sharks .... and it sounded like a bluff! ... but the man panga-d back to the boat with us ... and beneath our boat were HUGE sharks ... i'd guess 10 the that were 6 to 8 feet long ... sophie would guess 20 that were 10-15 feet long!! she was scared ... she was worried that they'd bite the boat ... or jump up into the air and grab at us .... sophie, just don't fall in and you'll be ok! ... hammer heads are the most common sharks in that bit of water, and i wish we could have seen them ... but we saw galapagos sharks and black tip reef sharks (not near a reef?) .....

we boated across the small channel between n. seymour and santa cruz and stopped at a beach ... las bachas ... we had lunch on the boat... i felt awful and didn't eat ... everyone else enjoyed chicken and rice and chocolate sauced canteloups fore dessert ...

after lunch there, drew and andy and sophie jumped in the water to swim ashore ....above, my non professional pic of drew jumping in ......

julia didn't want to wear a life vest snorkeling for this second day of snorkeling, but she wasn't quite confident enough to swim all the way ashore ..... so she and i panga'd in with most of the other boat people .... we were about a dozen total ...

 we all snorkeled ... it was great .... schools of fish and a different underwater landscape than the day before at bartholome ...

while i was snorkeling and holding hands with sophie, we did a lot of pointing to make sure the other didn't miss anything ... it's a tall order to be in the galapagos islands and not miss anything!!