[Today's article is the first of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne.]
Prologue
Last month my wife and I went to the Galapagos islands. While there we got to see a lot of unique wild life, both terrestrial and marine. The marine wild life we saw while snorkelling. I will be presenting four stories about things that happened while I was snorkelling, and in order to build the suspense I will be presenting them in ascending order of likely hood that I could have been injured or killed during the story.
Part 1 – Sea Turtles Mate.
One of the major reasons for planning this trip was it has always been on of my wife’s life long dreams to swim with sea turtles. Half the reason we went was for that experience alone.
The first time we got to swim with the turtles we were with a group of 14 people, in a small bay. Our naturalist guide was able to find a turtle for us to follow and look at. The turtle was about 60 cm long, and very graceful to swim with. He didn’t seem at all put out by the humans following him around. Very quickly the group dropped off to about 8 diehards and we followed that turtle around the bay for a while. We got to see a lot of how they move in the water, and I personally swam right along side him for as long as I could hold my breath.
The next time we saw turtles was much more exciting. We were just chilling on a beach for a few hours, it wasn’t part of a tour and our guide wasn’t looking for turtles for us. However he did tell us that this beach was know to have a lot of turtles in the water. Now as I said we were in the Galapagos to look at turtles so we weren’t going to pass on this opportunity. Thanks to many years of scuba training I am a very good snorkel, and good at running an underwater search pattern. So we worked out this deal. I would go out into the water and look for turtles. When I found one I would signal Ravynne and follow the turtle until she caught up with me, then we could both swim with the turtle. We put the plan into action and within 10 minutes I had found a turtle sleeping on the bottom. The key is to look for rocks with flippers, those are the turtles. This turtle was more annoyed by the fact that I had woken him up and made a serious effort to lose me. He was at least 1 meter in length and swimming much faster than the previous turtle. He was also resisting all of my efforts to herd him towards the shore so Ravynne would have an easier time catching us. In the end he ended up swimming out in to choppier water where the visibility wasn’t as good and I lost him before Ravynne could catch up and see him, but not before he stirred up a smaller friend.
By this time Ravynne did catch up to me so I told her that I had seen a total of two turtles in 10 minutes so it wouldn’t be any trouble finding her another one, but she should stay closer to me, and in fact I was right. Five minutes later I was able to find another 1 meter long turtle. Together we followed it around the ocean for a while. During this time it went and woke up one of it’s friends that we didn’t follow, and it came up for air right in my wife’s face so she got to get a really close face to face encounter with her turtle. Eventually we stopped chasing him and let him swim off into the murky water.
Ravynne and I went back to sun on the beach for a while, and I told some of the other members of our group how to spot turtles. They went out and had an equally successful wildlife encounter.
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