During the night we went around the western most part of Isabella Island on our way to Floreana Island.  It was noticeably bumpier.  Now, I know the professional ocean-going CruiseBoysians will scoff while reading that, but just a minute…

Above is an edited version of the excellent map of the Galapagos on Wikipedia (take a look if you want more details).  The vast majority of this cruise has been over the pale blue depth of around 100 meters.  You can see the drop to the west of Isabella – that is 3000 meters.  Yep, a 30x increase in depth in that short of a distance.

• First, this really shows the nature of hotspots on plate tectonics and island building.  As the Nazca Plate moves west-to-east volcanoes and islands form.
• Second, the Galapagos is at the intersection of many major ocean currents.  The Cromwell Current is a deep, cold current that comes from the west.  It comes speeding up that 3000-meter cliff into the islands.  That’s great for animal life, but adds some chop to cruise ships crossing from Isabela to Floreana.

With that behind us, we arrived in Post Office Bay.  Yes, that’s its name.  I’m not kidding.

Seems back in the sailing age, whaling ships would be at sea for months.  So, someone created this barrel where sailors will leave letters before they went off.  Any ship returning to the mainland would grabs the letters and take them as far as their port.  Slowly such letters would make their way across the world.  This is an echo of human history before the invention of actual national postal services.

Here we found many post cards within sealable plastic bags.  Of course, they are from cruise ship passengers now.  I grabbed some from folks that live in Arizona and will put a stamp on them when I get home.  I dropped off cards to myself and my Sister in a bag from everyone on this Silversea cruise.  We’ll see how long it takes to get there.

Floreana was one of the early inhabited islands, thus site of many early failures.  You can see the paragraph about “The Baroness” and her harem in the wiki page.  I’m sure not going into details here.

Not much for natural history this morning, so I only brought my phone camera.  There were some finches, but only one close enough to photograph.  I did get an advertising picture of the ship and a Zodiac.

Cooking Tidbits:

How in the heck do cooks get the decorative, flavored chocolate is such perfect circle around the cake?  It looks like the rings of Saturn.

Here is a Shrimp and Coconut Milk cerviche.  Next to it is a bowl of popcorn and dried plantain that you add to the cerviche to give it a crunch.  All are served cold.