Tag: Catherine

Guest Blog by Catherine

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Having swum with green sea turtles before in Hawaii, I was on a quest during our Galapagos trip to finally swim with sea lions.  Our naturalist guide, Dres, was confident that we’d see plenty of sea lions during our snorkeling adventures.  Like most of the wildlife in the Galapagos, they have had little to fear from human visitors.  That “innocente” as our guides described it in combination with an innate curiosity made human-sea lion interactions almost unavoidable.

Sure enough, during our second snorkel off the beach on Fernandina, a friendly sea lion zipped around me while I snorkeled, circling me while I snapped pictures.  Getting back on the boat, we couldn’t wait to download the pictures from the underwater camera to see what incredible footage we had captured of our amazing encounter.

Sadly, excitement combined with trying not to drown while operating a camera does not make for fantastic photos…

Here is my best shot of the side of our sea lion friend…

 

The clear winner from the day – an action shot of the sea lion’s armpit…or underflipper (not quite sure what the official term is).

 

Our next snorkel outing I was determined to remain calm and capture a great shot if I was lucky enough to see more sea lions in the water.  We were snorkeling in deep water off Floreana.  As we jumped off the panga, I stayed to adjust my mask while the rest of the group swam away.  Floating out in the middle of the ocean, a dark blur came up and grabbed my fin.  After I stopped yelling and realized it was a sea lion and not a shark, I turned on my camera and tried to get some good pictures.  He (or she) zipped around me, darting in to get a closer look and them zooming away.

Later that evening, I downloaded the files from my camera to see that, although considerably better than the first attempt, National Geographic would not be calling anytime soon…

 

 

 

Luckily, Olivia took possession of the camera for the remainder of the trip and filmed this playful sea lion using giant sea stars to amuse himself!

If National Geographic is interested, she’ll be available in about four years!

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Thank you Catherine, for a most entertaining story!  And thank you Olivia, for saving the day with the wonderful sea lion video!

Click HERE to see what Olivia has to say  

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Adventure Bound

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Note – if you arrived here via a link we provided to read about our Galápagos Adventure, you will find a Click HERE link at the bottom of each post that takes you to the next post in the series.

We are preparing for our upcoming adventure to the Galápagos Islands. We leave this week and will be gone for about a week and a half. Hope to take lots of photos and may even share a few 🙂

We are looking forward to booking up with family and friends – more on that later, once we see who actually makes it for the trip! Neither Lou nor I are 100% fit, but then, we’d never go anywhere if that was our target. Lou is adapting to his new knee, and I am wrestling with a few old age related things like bone spurs in my foot. But, hopefully we will be able to rise to the challenge and enjoy the trip. If hiking is too much for us, we can always sit back, sipping gin and tonics on the deck of the boat.

A preview of what is to come:

Click HERE for the scoop on our arrival in Ecuador.