We woke up this morning in the beautiful half-moon bay at the small island of San Francisco.

The day’s activities included a guided nature walk in the morning and snorkeling in the afternoon.

The nature walk was led by Jenny. 

She covered the whole range of topics – skeletal identification of beach finds, plants, geology, bird identification and nesting habits, salt mining; you name it, she talked about it.  It was a great walk.

Following lunch we lounged a bit until our 3:30 snorkel time.  While we were lounging we took the opportunity to visit the bridge.  We got an in-depth explanation of navigation, sounding, radar, and anchor placement from Scott, the second mate on duty.  Fascinating stuff.  He also demonstrated the auto navigation system and showed us the wheel. 

Eventually it was time for our snorkel trip.  We donned wetsuits and boarded our skiff to the dive site.  Along the way we made a detour to try and recover a camera that our guide (Wilson) had placed in the morning.  He was shooting video of the holes made by a rather elusive species of eel, hoping the get a glimpse of the shy critters.  Unfortunately he couldn’t find the camera, so we continued to our drop-off point.  The swim was rather successful.  I’ll let Cheryl rate it from her perspective but I was impressed on a number of levels.  We were swimming among massive boulders that created many crevices and holes for fish to hide in and poke their noses out from. 

We saw a good variety of really beautiful fish and at one point found ourselves swimming thru a large school of small silver fish – Wilson called them “bait fish” which probably means “small silver fish that could be almost anything.”

Eventually it was time to return to the skiff.  Unfortunately there was another skiff unloading at the boat so we had to wait – which gave us time to take one more pass looking for Wilson’s camera.  He found it.

Returning to the boat we quickly showered, dressed and headed to the lounge for happy hour where we had warm drinks, chatted with friends (including Cliff – a funny old guy from New Zeland who tells great stories) and signed up for tomorrow’s fun and games.  

After dinner it was up to the lounge for a lecture on some of the unusual mating habits of marine creatures.

Tomorrow is Sea Lion day.  Cheryl will be observing them from a skiff.  Randy will be snorkeling along their shore hoping that they will come out and play.  Should be interesting.

Till then, Nite all.

In the morning we hiked up a steep hill to get a great view overlooking Half Moon Bay

(it was so steep and I’m so out of shape I had to stop half way up and rest – plus my left knee was sending out jabs of pain even though I had grabbed 2 hiking sticks for help (even hurts going up and down stairs – another reason I didn’t do the mule ride). Once on top, however, I had no problem walking along on the ridge crest trail

Along the way we saw osprey nests on a large rock outcropping into the ocean. Jenny explained there were 2 nests within 3 feet of each other because the old nest probably had parasites.

At 3:00 we started putting on our layers and wet suits (I bought a “rash guard” long sleeve shirt as an extra layer and it did help keep me warm) -we just pulled on the bottom of our wet suits and left the top half flopping while we grabbed our gear bags of snorkels, masks & fins, then donned the life vests for the skiff ride out to the snorkeling rocks. Instead of wading in the water from the beach, this time we would be jumping over the side into the water. I was having a lot of trouble keeping the water out of my mask until I finally got the back of the head strap low enough to keep it tight to my cheeks (when you get out you look like a raccoon with mask marks all around your eyes). My favorite fish were the long narrow coronet fish. We were also taught the snorkeling safely hand signals to show if you were ok/were in trouble/ or had spotted something fantastic for everybody to come see (this one is actually a loud squeal/yell through your snorkel tube). After 45 minutes I was chilled and headed back to the skiff (I was actually the second one back – I held out longer than Claudia did) and the others kept at it for another 10 minutes. When we got back to the boat I spent a long time in the shower trying to warm up – the pins & needles in my hands hurt.

The appetizers at the cocktail hour tonight were lobster tarts – yum!