So on day six, we spend the morning cruising south to Isla San Francisco. The idea is we’ll be looking for wildlife on the way, but as it turns out, the weather isn’t ideal, with heavy winds and cold temperatures. No one is real excited about being outside looking for things. Most folks are hanging out in the lounge. Lots of folks are sharing photos they’ve taken of shipmates via Airdrop. During this time, Doug is also trying to figure out how to view videos from his SLR camera on his iPad and ultimately discovers the camera defaults to a video format that doesn’t transfer onto iDevices without conversion . In the process, he discovers several great videos of bears from our Alaska trip that he didn’t know existed!
At some point Kelly the guide offers to teach anyone who’s interested how to use their SLR cameras on settings other than Automatic. While Doug has taken several photography classes and theoretically has learned this before, I little refresher never hurts and he spends 20-30 minutes learning how to use his camera.
About lunch time, we get to our destination and by this time the weather has improved. We end up in a cove that has good wind protection and the sun starts to peek out. It’s starting to look like the afternoon will be nice.
We take a skiff over to the beach in time for a Tide Pool walk with guides Mike and Mareth. This involves walking a short distance across the island to the other side which is rockier. Once there we start walking through the tide pools left by the receding tide. There are lots of rocks and if you carefully lift them up, there are bunches of small creatures to observe. Once done, the secret is to put the rocks back carefully so as not to crush everything you’ve just discovered. We see tons of sea stars, crabs, urchins, slugs, plus lots of things neither of us remembers the name of. The sea stars with the skinny legs can move very quickly!
After a while we stop finding new things and the group starts heading back towards the sandy beach on the other side of the small island. To do this, we go across a salt flat and see an area where locals are “mining” salt for sale. Mike digs some up and everyone has a taste - it tastes like salt!
Back at the beach, the crew has again set up a bar and there are blankets, beach chairs, kayaks, and paddle boards for those interested. We’ve brought over our wetsuits and snorkel gear to do some snorkeling off the beach. As it turns out, this is by far the best visibility we have and there is a great variety of fish and coral to see. Travis gets some great pictures and we’re both glad we brought our gear with us. Even better, we both manage to squeeze back out of our wetsuits on the beach without any of the crew capturing photos. It’s a good afternoon!
Back on the boat at happy hour, we learn that our options for tomorrow include snorkeling with sea lions, watching sea lions from a dive boat, skiff tours, and kayaking. Doug elects to snorkel with the sea lions in the morning and kayak in the afternoon. Travis is tired of cold water and elects to do a skiff tour in the morning and visit the sea lions by boat in the afternoon.
After another great dinner, we adjourn to the lounge for Trivia night. Basically, if interested, you form a team and compete against other teams answering various trivia questions based on info you might have had an opportunity to learn throughout the week. Lead guide Marika is the quiz master and she’s using questions gathered from all the other guides. Of course this means any one individual couldn’t have heard everything over the week as it’s impossible to do every activity. We form a team with Mary Ellen and Nancy, a couple from the Seattle area. Our team goal is to not come in last. Some of the questions are wildlife specific (whale migrations, blue footed boobies, etc.), others are more pop culture (what town is the Eagle’s Hotel California based on), or historic (how many US states or parts of states have been ruled by Mexico). Our team was excellent at second guessing ourselves. After the first round, we were tied for last place (there were five teams). We did slightly better in the second round. In the final round, we held steady and one competing team had a disastrous finish so we ended up tied for third. We were very happy with our Bronze finish! We weren’t bitter at all that the winning team had folks who’d been on this particular cruise three times. No - we weren’t bitter about that at all. Not one little bit.
Today’s journey
Mareth with some type of urchin
Mike uncovering a sea star
How many creatures can you spot?
Some of these sea stars have really long legs!
Another type of sea star
Mike with some type of slug or sea cucumber?
This guy wasn’t in the tide pool
Doug trying not to kill something
The salt flats
One of the areas where locals are digging out salt
Travis getting ready to transform to snorkel man
Another sea star while snorkeling
