The first light of the day found us navigating between Isabela and Fernandina Islands at Bolivar’s Channel in the western realm of the Galápagos archipelago. We arrived at Fernandina and disembarked on the black lava flow of Punta Espinoza. The most pristine island in the Galápagos and the youngest one, Fernandina has a spectacular landscape. Today it showed its entire splendor with a very large dome-shaped volcano covered in black lava flows and relatively small forests of mangrove that dot the coastal area and provide some color against the harsh lava.

Our main goal this morning was to find Galápagos marine iguanas in their natural habitat. This island has the largest population of marine iguanas and we certainly found several of these reptiles basking under the sun while others were slowly going into the water to feed on algae. The other unusual animal we looked for was the Galápagos flightless cormorant; this rather large bird with very short wings is a great diver that feeds on fish, octopus, and eels. We found some couples nesting and one of them changed guard in front of us showing us a small chick.

After this walk we headed back to the ship and then navigated to the northern region of Isabela Island. This afternoon we went snorkeling with sea turtles and took a Zodiac ride along the coast of Punta Vicente Roca where we saw blue-footed boobies, Nazca boobies, Galápagos fur seals, marine iguanas, Galápagos penguins, and brown noddy terns. Later on, with the sunset, we celebrated the crossing of the Equator onboard our ship.