Did you know the Spotted Eagle Rays celebrate Valentine’s Day too? They made a brief appearance in our Galapagos edition of Frisky Business. You’ll have to use your imaginations on this one, I couldn’t make a good a photo, the most I managed was to capture a small spotted triangle peeking out of the water. I only found out a couple of days ago that we are there during mating season….I had no idea. We think we plan every trip to the most minute level of detail, and then somehow we manage to miss some of the largest considerations. I feel lucky we are here this time of year.

We made the most of our last full day in the Galapagos. We were up again at 4:30 AM to finish breakfast and pile into the zodiacs by 6:00 AM. Right now a wake up time of 5:30 AM will feel like sleeping in. I’m sure you are tired of me telling you what time we are getting up every day, but I really want sympathy points, and need an explanation for these rambling and somewhat incoherent posts.

Peter’s unknown, but now just realized, dream of photographing a Galapagos Sea Arch at sunrise was fulfilled this morning. It was quite the adventure as we surfed the wave coming through the arch – while trying to protect a ridiculous amount of camera gear with our bodies. At one point Mark breaks into an a cappella version of Surfin’ USA and a few of us join in. The zodiac driver must of thought we’d absolutely lost our marbles.

We then spent a joyous two hours on the most beautiful beach in the world. We shared the place with a few Sally’s and a couple of sea lions. But mostly we had it to ourselves.

The Galapagos Archipelago receives 290,000 visitors a year. This is less than the annual visitation to Big Bend National Park. I feel grateful that I was one of the lucky few people to visit this remote place. The entire area is a national park which is tightly managed to control human impact. The park creates a few itineraries of different lengths (3-day, 4-day, 8-day) and then assigns each boat an itinerary with a set day and time where their tourists can visit a specific location. The result is you are never really sharing a place with more than two or three boats, and if you are there with other boats, your visit is staggered so there is very little overlap with other groups. Sitting on that beach this morning just reinforced what a magical place this is and the level of care that is taken to try to preserve it.