What’s it like to swim with sea lions? Check out this video that Jen shot today on our big day trip to Pinzon Island. The sea lions were particularly interactive.

Nadia takes to the sea.

We also saw tortoises and white tipped sharks, but, alas, no penguins. There were plenty of fish — huge schools of sardines, large, colorful parrotfish, and plenty of others I can’t name but looked really cool. Zoe even found an octopus crammed into a crack in the rocks.

Aside from Pinzon Island, we visited a beach on the north shore of Santa Cruz (which is where Zoe saw the octopus) and snorkeled around something called Drowned Rock, just off Daphne Major Island.

On the homeward leg with Daphne Minor in the background

Possibly the two best photo opportunities of the day went unrecorded: once because I didn’t have the camera and a sea lion nibbled at a resting shark until the shark got angry and swam off (with the sea lion following, swimming in loops around the shark); and once because I did have the camera but was sitting in the boat with Lanie while Zoe, Jen and Nadia were snorkeling with sharks and rays. Oh, well.

The Pansonic Lumix DMC TS25underwater camera did its job once again, though not without causing some stress. After it’s been submerged for a while the screen stops working and we’re never sure if it’s taking pictures until we get back and plug it into the computer. It did that in Belize, we remembered; but still after seeing so much cool stuff, we wanted to be able to share.
Here are some of the many pictures we took:

Sleepy sharks waiting for a sea lion to come nibble them

One of us swimming above a sea turtle

Zoe dives into a school of sardines.

Lunch on the boat was yellowfin tuna caught during yesterday’s tour. (Most of us were excited about it.)

Fab, our guide, tried to catch something for tomorrows’s tour…but it got away. If he had landed something good, he was going to give us a little as sashimi.