Commodore
February 24, 2023

Friday 24 February – Lava Tunnel Tour

A lie in at last for some of us, Phoebs and Daniel went to visit the Tortoise centre as they hadn’t seen any yet. We arrived at the dock at 11am, greeted by mad Claudia in her National Parks guiding gear. She is a laugh and her good English makes it all worth while listening to her stories. Sadly the penguins were nowhere to be seen on our way out. It was well over an hour’s fast boat journey, along the way we stopped at the blip of rocks sticking out of the sea that we thought were under the water! Amazing how close we got, it must be a steep drop off. The tunnel area was quite something, we had to catch an enormous wave into the area which was quite alarming, the driver waits for the correct wave and then rides it in with full throttle, you would not want a novice driver. Once in we went and snorkelled in an area where the sea horses live, Claudia swam like a bat out of hell, so eccentric with her fingers splayed and with the nastiest encrusted carbuncle on her leg! She had one of the boat guys go and search for the sea horses for us and sure as nuts he found one. They are about 30cm big, the only seahorses I have ever seen were about 10cm long. Shortly afterwards another boat arrived and they spotted 3 more sea horses, which were slightly deeper. They really are magical creatures.

Then the channels begin, which are old lava tunnels many broken but lots of bridges still left. We wove our way through the contorted water ways, again the driver was incredibly skilful as we had about 10cm each side of us before hitting jagged lava. It is too hard to explain and the photos will do it better justice. It was incredible with endless turtles gliding around. We did a little walk initially and saw some Blue Footed Boobies doing a little mating routine which was very cute. We had a Canadian man on the boat who is an architect who takes water colour paints and pens around, sketching in his journal rather than taking photos which was really admirable. Hi coloured sketch of the blue footed boobies caught their manner perfectly.

After that we got into the water and swum around the tunnels. It was amazing how many sharks and turtles there were. The sharks were resting under the lava caves, you hold onto the lava with one hand and put your head under the water, landing up eye to eye with sharks. There were loads of baby sharks and quite a few really big ones. They all seemed incredibly chilled. It was a great day out getting back just after 4pm, with the driver and assistant in hysterics as Claudia had fallen asleep!

We headed back to PolePole and had some more of our tuna for super, really delicious. It was an early night as we planned for an early departure to Santa Cruz Island in the morning. We were the only Arc boat left for the night.