Kicker Rock
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Sat 15 Feb 2014 19:27
There are volcanic rocks all around the bay, but the sand is still white and nice.
Turtles - obviously!
After that we boarded a small boat and headed out to Kicker Rock. Strangely the local name for this is Leon Dormida, on account of the fact that the rock looks like a lion sitting there. I am not sure where the name Kicker Rock comes from.
Kicker Rock
This might look a little bit more like a sleeping lion? Not sure myself!
The snorkelling here was truly amazing. Neither of us have ever seen anything like it. We were told to expect white and black tip reef sharks, possibly silky sharks and maybe even a hammerhead shark or two. Despite this we were still unprepared for what we saw. There must have been hundreds of sharks down there! They were everywhere swimming around in huge groups. They seemed completely unfazed by all the snorkellers. The most spectacular thing we saw was a huge group of about 30 eagle rays swimming past - fabulous!!
Sharks!
A school of eagle rays
As part of our initial clearance procedure when we first arrived, the hulls of all the boats were inspected for 'foreign bodies'. Some boats did not pass the test and unfortunately had to leave the anchorage and rendezvous with a dive boat 75 miles away, (40 miles out of the national park limits), to have their bottoms scrubbed. They all leave tomorrow evening. Luckily for us we are in the 'Clean Bottom Club' and don't have to go. We did clean the fairly substantial beard off our waterline before we left Contadora, so that helped.
The sea-lions are also getting a bit more adventurous. We haven't had a problem yet but tonight I was woken up at 2.30am, by a honking noise and a foul smell - we had two sea-lions on the back deck. I then woke John up to deal with them - there was no chance of me dealing with them, and sent him out with the boat hook to convince them to leave. We got back to sleep, and then got woken up again two hours later when they came back - they are very persistent. Doug's first job the next day was to tighten the 'defences'. The two fenders we had out were clearly not enough, so we added a water carrier and two old morning lines wrapped round and round the rails. He has either created a better barrier against them or an adventure playground for them - we shall see!
Doug's sea-lion playground - it actually held up as a great defence twice last night when sea-lions attempted to board the boat!
A second trip up the mast for me was needed to check the sail to see if we could drop it easily. That all now looks to be in order, so all we need is a bit of calm weather. We most likely will deal with it on the way to Santa Cruz, our next stop. We need to drop the sail, re-attach it to the lift which takes it up the forestay using a shackle off the bottom of the smaller headsail which will have had less wear, and re hoist it. Hopefully we will be able to do this at sea easily enough. We may also have to loosen the gib to get the shackle off, but we shall see. Fingers crossed it will be straightforward!
We have a couple more days here and leave on Tuesday to go to Santa Cruz which is the main island in the archipelago. The town there is a bit more substantial than here. I have been a bit surprised at how scruffy the place is, I expected things to be a bit smarter, less unfinished breeze block buildings etc. Everything here looks very tired, half built or half collapsing, sometimes it's hard to tell which, and generally quite ugly.
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