We continued north along the shore of Isabela
to Tagus Cove, a lovely sheltered cove where the Charles Darwin’s ship, Beagle, also anchored in 1835.
The soft cliffs all around were covered with
graffiti carved by past visitors, until forbidden in about 1975.
We followed Mr Darwin's
footsteps up to a turquoise crater lake, which he was disappointed to find was
also brackish - connected to the sea through small channels in the rocks, too
small for animals to pass through. Darwin’s finches were foraging for insects
under the bark of the incense trees and black carpenter bees bore holes in the
dead branches for their solitary nests. Apart from the carptenter bees,large painted locusts were about the only other conspicuous insect. 
We
continued around the lake and up through the loose lava scree onto the ridge,
ending on top of an eroded splatter cone.
From there, we could see Darwin Volcano's far slope and a view down to
the other side of the island.
 |
| Diego in discussion with Drew (with b ack to the view) and Holly |
We headed back down to the cove. While the rest of the
passengers went for a panga ride, Drew and I paddled kayaks along the shore. It
was good to be able to go close inshore to see the yellow and orange encrusting
sponges, sea anemones, urchins and three different sea stars. The different
wavy layers of laval flows were clearly visible on the cliffs and were eroded
into lovely wind caves, or perhaps they were laval tubes. One large laval tube
forming a cave at sea level was occupied by a pair of Galápagos penguins.
Nearby were a nesting heron and a family of flightless cormorants. Sea lions
lounged on the rocks or frolicked in the water. Then it was time for a vigorous
paddle back to the Nemo.
We changed
into our bathers and wetsuits and went back out for a snorkel under the cliffs.
The water was very cold which probably accounted for the rich variety of fish (yellow
and orange blotched harlequin wrasse, bumphead Mexican hog fish and several
other wrasse, porcupine fish, large schools of tiny rainbow wrasse and large
Peruvian grunts with a prominent lateral line).
A large turtle surfaced right
beside me.
Drew was back in the panga and I was just about to escape the cold
water when we saw a pair of penguins swimming around.
They were wonderful to
watch, weaving around snapping up fish and foraging in the weed, flying around
so gracefully underwater, up to the surface for a breath, then down again
leaving a stream of bubbles in their wake.
I had really been hoping to see penguins 'flying' underwater as I have never seen them underwater before.
(Sadly this was the swan song for my underwater camera, that had been fogging up for some time, until its electronics finally sucumbed to the seawater. Fortunately I was still able to download my photos when I got home)
We really appreciated the hot soup
with lunch as we all tried to raise our core body temperatures after snorkelling in the cold Humbolt Current.
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