Monday, January 9
The next day we dinghied around to the fisherman’s beach where trails start. A panga crew unloaded manta rays, cleaning them and rinsing in the sea. Green corrugated metal fishing shacks lined the beach reminding me of the NW native long houses in minature. At the far end men were building small cement domes with holes in them. These turned out to be structures that would be used to help rebuild damaged reefs.
A few steps from where we parked the dinghy, scrufty stunted
trees grew or attempted to. Enormous frigate birds occupied every branch,
sitting on nests of straw, some with white fuzzy babies. The density of birds
was truly indescribable.
For our hike we chose the route to the booby nesting area along the eastern cliff tops. Walking through the guano coated frigate nesting trees on the way to the cliff our ears were filled with such groans, clacks and shrieks it was like a horror movie sound track.
We had been warned not to step on the boobies and indeed their nests were nothing but depressions in the dirt. The head feathers of the blue footed boobies reminded us of hedgehogs.
One might think that having visitors would be bad for reproduction, but other than a scratchy "Scat!" or two aimed at us, the boobies just seemed inured to intrusion. Isla Isabella is sometimes known as Little Galapagos. Having visited those famous islands, Colene confirmed that our exposure to the resident birds exceeded the possibilities available on most of them due to the huge number of visitors.
In the afternoon we snorkeled around the nearest Mona and
saw a good variety of reef fish including a large green eel. Too bad the sun wasn’t out then. Colene
climbed into her sausage suit for protection, but I swam with bare legs and fortunately found no little
biting jellyfish.
That night the anchorage was a roll hole. A neighbor boat readjusted its anchor and we stood anchor watch for a while even though the wind hardly blew.
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| Coral covered domes for reef rebuilding |
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