The Snorkel Trip of All Snorkel Trips

Our intrepid traveler on the tour boat dock.

Our tour guide started out with "Well, can you swim?"

 On Monday April 20th we became full fledged tourists, sans the safari shirts and $5,000 Nikons, and joined a tour to the famous Las Tunneles. Eight tourists and two full-fledged cruisers all boarded a glorified panga with twin 125 hp outboards and began the 25-minute ride south along Isabella’s coast, cruising along at a steady 30 knots.

Forlorn home to the red-footed boobies.

Along the way we stopped at an oddball rock out in the middle of nowhere to see and learn about blue-footed and red-footed boobies. The red-footed boobie spends most of their time at sea while the blue-footed are a more terrestrial bird. Oh, and one has red feet and the other blue feet.

This is the entrance to Les Tunnels. There are rocks everywhere, with the added extra that it's very shallow.

White mangrove tree growing on the lava outcropping.

After another 10 minutes of bouncing around in the offshore swells, the boat did an abrupt right-hand turn into a swirling surf line. He wove the boat right and left like a conga dancer following some unseen underwater channel through the surf and then came to a calmer area, but one with rocks protruding from the water everywhere. I would never, ever take a boat into such a place. But these boat drivers were the original fisherman who used to enter this labyrinth while fishing for lobster. We passed through areas with rocks almost scraping the hull on both sides at once. Further and further in we wove, passing lava arches and pristine aqua pools resembling an enchanted fairyland.

Our guide (you don’t go anywhere in the Galapagos without a guide) explained this was once a molten lava field that entered the ocean, and at some point the lava tubes collapsed leaving a bay-like area littered with lava rocks. Absolutely amazing.

Love is in the air, the beginning of the famous "boobie love dance."

 As the boat wove in and out of the passages it would slow and we’d be looking eye-to-eye with a blue-footed boobie or two (I’m not much of a bird expert but the blue feet do give them away.) The animals in the Galapagos, for whatever reason, have no fear of man. You can approach them very closely in most cases (be careful of the sea lions) and get some incredible pictures. At each stop the naturalist explained the traits and habits of the various seabirds and mammals.

Not much grows out on the lava flows except cactus.

At one point, so far into the labyrinth that I would never have found my way out, we came upon several other tourist boats tied up to a lava wall. We disembarked for a short tour of the lava field where the guide showed us a nesting site for the blue-footed boobie (even you, with no ornithology experience, can identify this bird). Nearby several female blue-footed boobies sat solitary on rocks, until they heard the shrill whistle of the male bird who landed close to one of the forlorn females. The male began lifting one foot, then the other in the famous boobie mating dance (seriously, people come from all over the world to witness this). It was kind of cute to watch, with the female doing her version of the same.

We then boarded the boat and headed further into a large pool-like area, where we suited up for our snorkeling trip. Normally this would be fun but we had about 8 totally novice snorkelers, and the guide wanted everyone up close and personal. Trying to avoid having your mask kicked off was a challenge. Some really couldn’t even swim that well and had life jackets on. I was patiently videoing some yellow-fined damsel fish when all of a sudden a GoPro on an extension stick come in over my head, soon followed by its owner. I tended to hang to the back of the group, but that was a disadvantage as the guide “discovered new surprises,” like a free swimming sea horse that I never got to see. Also a stone fish that disappeared back into the camouflage.

A green sea turtle, up close and personal. (The photos with date stamps where taken by the tour operator.)

Schools of beautiful yellow-tailed surgeonfish.

 I was amazed by the green sea turtles. I have never seen so many or so close up. One poor fellow was surrounded by about six snorkelers; luckily he was pretty laid back about the whole thing. I got some great footage (that I’ll upload as soon as I find some bandwidth) swimming within two feet of these prehistoric monsters. I sat and watched them nibble on the algae lining the rocks, then slowly surface for a gulp of air, then back to the rocks for more algae.

A lonely Galapagos penguin.

A lonely Galapagos penguin with his new friend.

As we swam by a rock the guide popped up to show us a solitary Galapagos penguin, quietly sitting on a rock outcropping about two feet above us. Everyone circled around to have their picture taken with the penguin. Gotta wonder what he was thinking.

After awhile you are totally overwhelmed by the sheer richness of the environment, it’s like a primordial stew from which all life emerged. This is caused by the upwelling of the colder Humboldt Current by the warmer Counter Equatorial (or Cromwell Current) pushing all the deeper-dwelling nutrients to the surface creating a Disneyland for sea life. According to Darwin, “. . . about 25% of the known algae, invertebrates, and shore fishes [of the Galapagos] occur nowhere else on earth.”

I couldn't pick out this sea horse from the mangrove root from two feet away.

 

Our guide led us in a single file line with our bellies barely clearing the rocks (some of our bellies scraped more than others) in places further into the labyrinth to a final secluded pool, where one by one he had us swim over to his location deep in the mangroves. There, about two feet below the surface was something I’d waited years to see:  a sea horse. It was so well camouflaged that even at one foot away I didn’t see it until he pointed it out. It exactly resemble the mangrove root it’s tail was attached to. Again, amazing.

White-tipped reef sharks who are hopefully sleeping.

The guide saved the best for last. We entered another secluded pool and he had us swim over to a semi submerged lava arch. Underwater we could barely make out the shapes of three white-tipped sharks resting near the back of the cave. White-tips are nocturnal hunters and sleep in caves and under ledges during the day. The water was so full of nutrients that you had to dive down a bit to more clearly make them out. But getting deeper in the cave with them didn’t seem like a great idea at the time.

He swam over to say good-bye.

Swimming back to the boat I got another drive-by by a huge green sea turtle while the rest of the group was boarding the boat and oblivious to what was swimming right beneath them. We got hosed off with fresh water as we boarded the boat and passed around juice and sandwiches for a late lunch. Most of the participants on our boat were Spanish speakers so we couldn’t participate in the normal animated post dive banter, but after all that exercise we almost nodded off during the long ride back to the anchorage.

What a great day!