Day 5 Galapagos (morning): Tagus Cove, Isabela Island

Diane: We anchored this morning in a cul-de-sac surrounded by cliffs covered with grafitti. Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, Tagus Cove was a popular anchorage. Many ships that stopped here scratched and/or painted the date and their ship’s name on these rocks. The National Park Service now prohibits new grafitti. But they left much of the existing grafitti as a tribute to history.

You-Gotta-Love-It Aside: This reminds me of the official Bureau of Land Management policy in the Black Rock Desert. If you toss a beer bottle on the desert floor, you’re littering. If you find a 20 year old beer bottle on the desert floor, somebody else littered; as a responsible conservationist, you should throw the bottle away properly. However, if you find a 50 year old beer bottle on the desert floor, it’s an historical artificat and you are not allowed to touch it. And that is how we preserve history.

Many sea lions and their strong smell greeted us as we landed at Tagus Cove. I hadn’t noticed the smell of their urine before, but it was highly concentrated here. We walked by some very old grafitti just past our landing site. We then went on to Darwin’s Lake, which has a higher salt content and water level than the nearby sea. Evidently, the volcanic rock that connects the bottom of the lake to the sea is porous enough to let water run back and forth, but not salt. So salt washes down from the surrounding hills and stays in the lake. We had a good photo-op from the hill above Darwin’s Lake

We followed the walk with a spectacular panga ride. We saw some flightless cormorants as well as a Galapagos penguin, but the the blue-footed boobies were especially photogenic today - from a distance,






up close,






as well as in between.






Isabells’s cliffs showed striations that captured some of the geological turmoil that must have been present during their formation.