We woke this morning off the coast of Floreana, where we skipped breakfast in order to get to our landing early. Our one chance to see Flamingos!
Beautiful beach where we landed, then hiked over small ridge to a lagoon which is fed by tidal water from underneath. Only two flamingos an adult and a chick but the chick spent a lot of time just walking around in front of us, posing!
The adult was out farther in the water and eventually flew off. The chick, who can’t yet fly had a long walk home so we got to spend a fair amount of time with him.
Later that morning, back out on the beach we had this handsome guy, or girl, who didn’t seem to mind all the attention. The only way to tell male from female is size, the male being larger. With no others to compare, I don’t know which this was.
But we did see some of our other friends here as well.
A father’s work is never done. I’m guessing it’s an adult male based on the size of the pupil, the male’s being smaller.
So after our morning at Punta Cormorant, we started our navigation to another landing when we happened upon a huge pod of dolphins!
This really doesn’t tell the whole story because there were ton’s more than this, I can’t even begin to estimate how many! They were everywhere, all around the boat. They love to play in the wake and cruise along at the bow like they’re leading us. The Samba can only do 8 knots, so the dophins had no trouble keeping up or outrunning us! As they would veer off in another direction to feed, we would circle back around trying to stay with them.
Really hard to photograph because they were so fast and you never knew where or when they were going to jump! Ended up with a lot of images like the second one, just a little bit late!
After playing with the dolphins for a while, it was decided to skip the second landing and just continue on our journey to Espanola where we will make our first landing at 6:15 a.m. tomorrow morning.