Although we loved San Cristóbal and the sea lions there remains much to explore in the Galápagos islands.  We set sail for Santa Cruz, the island with the largest population and town.  Santa Cruz is the hub for many tours and activities and we figured to make a few visits and see some of the sights there.  It was a pleasant light air sail over where we made good time with the spinnaker.

Port Ayora

Definitely a larger and busier place than Puerto Baquerizo Moreno it is still a nice little town.  The water front area is crowded with restaurants, tour companies, dive shops and souvenir shops.  Avenue Charles Darwin is once again the main water front promenade, a clean wide street with a bike path and wide sidewalks.  As the main tourist starting point the prices are a little higher here, but walking around a bit can still secure you a nice lunch for only a few dollars.  The town also has hardware stores and even marine supply stores which is a welcome surprise.

The anchorage is a bit more of a challenge.  Facing South and open it is exposed to most of the roll that comes in from the ocean.  One of the few bits of equipment we neglected to get during our pre-departure fitting out spree was a stern anchor.  A stern anchor is a lighter anchor that deploys off the back of the boat, primarily to keep the boat from swinging.  It allows you to maintain the boat in single direction to avoid it being subject to the vagaries of wind and tides.

Why is this important?  In some places anchorages are tight and there is no room to swing.  Here in Santa Cruz most boats deploy them to keep their bows pointed into the sometimes sizable rollers that come in from the open water.  A boat’s motion bow-to a wave is much more manageable than the motion if the boat spins about and takes the waves side too.  Instead of a simple bobbing up and down this develops an unpleasant rolling motion, making life on board generally more difficult.  Without a stern anchor we’ve not always slept well every night, especially when the rolling gets loose objects moving around…including sleeping crew!

A view of the harbor, you can hardly see the three to four foot rollers.

Other than the constant rolling the harbor isn’t so bad.  There is no facility for dinghies to land so everyone uses water taxis; however they are cheap and reliable and run all day and most of the night so it works very well.  We’ve seen more than a few sharks around the boat which is very cool, though there are only a few sea lions and we miss them.

The Darwin Research Station

One of the attractions close to town is the Darwin Research Station, a preserve with a tortoise and iguana breeding center, as well as some informative displays and a lovely walking path through the native scrub brushes.  It is only a short stroll at the end Ave. Charles Darwin and one of the first things we did.

The breeding center at the Darwin Station differs from all the various other tortoise breeding centers in that if features multiple species from different islands.  If I showed you a picture of a tortoise today, then a different picture tomorrow would you be able to tell the species apart or even know if they are different?  To the lay person…probably not.  If I were to describe their shells as “saddle-backed” or “domed” it might not mean much to you.

These two are saddle-backed

This guy has a “domed” shell…

But put them side by side and you can see the distinct difference in them immediately.  Some vary in adult size but the shell shape is the real distinguishing characteristic.  I still can’t identify a species by looking at the shell shape, but at least I can tell two tortoises are different species when they are next to each other!

This is also the first place where we saw tortoise moving around with any conviction.   The tortoises we saw on San Cristóbal mostly sat there.  One sort of wiggled forward to get better access to the food pile he was sitting on top of, but we weren’t even certain if these guys could get their shells up off the ground to move.

Then can.  In fact they were faster than we supposed once they got up and started moving around.  Not speedy, anyone can keep up with one without breaking a walk.  But they do get up and get some ground clearance and do a pretty good job picking their way over the rocky and rough terrain they inhabit.  We were impressed.

A Galápagos mockingbird, one of many birds that are shy of people.

The research station grounds themselves are a lovely place to spend an afternoon.  Preferably a shady afternoon…or an early morning, the sun is strong 35 miles from the equator.  The paths are well laid out and the trees, bushes and cacti are full of birds.  Colorful lizards dart across the paths, and the waterfront areas are loaded with marine iguanas basking in the sun.

The breeding, iguana and interpretation centers all provide good information about what you are seeing in English and Spanish.  There are also a couple of gift shops with some the nicest (and most expensive by a fair bit) memorabilia we’ve seen. All in all the Darwin Station is well worth an afternoon of your time.

Lonesome George

The Darwin Research Station was the home of Lonesome George, the last surviving specimen of the Pinta Island tortoises.  Sadly he passed away in 2012, another species gone extinct in our lifetime.  Much has been made of George, he is still on t-shirts, in guide books, and all over memorabilia.  We only missed him by two years.

Seeing this plaque made me a little sad and reflective.  Having studied a lot of biology I know that for every species living today there are a thousand that have gone extinct and some of the mass extinctions we’ve had on earth make the loss of as single species of any sort little more than a statistic.  That doesn’t change that the extinction event we are in the middle of now is caused by our own short sightedness rather than natural forces like volcanoes or meteors. We make our world a little less rich every day with our heedless actions.

Species do not need to be wiped out like this.  But there is hope – now we realize that loading the holds of our ships with creatures like this is the wrong thing to do.  We know that introducing predators, pests and competitors to fragile ecosystems can have disastrous impacts.  Hopefully these lessons are not learned too late for a lot of species, but still the controversies of progress versus preservation rage on. A tortoise is a large and tangible thing, compared to a snail darter or insect.  Large and tangible symbols will hopefully be used and remembered the next time we bring a species to the brink.