The boat had moved during the night and when we woke up we were in Urbina Bay, on the western coast of Isabella Island. This morning's activities were going to be a combined land tour with snorkeling from the beach straight after. As usual, the crew had our snorkel gear and wetsuits ready at the back of the boat so all we had to do was grab them and a lifevest and jump in the dinghy.

It was a wet landing, getting our feet wet, on a black sand beach. If we hadn't been so used to the west coast beaches of Auckland, the black sand might have been a novelty for us too. On the beach though were sealions, pelicans and penguins to greet us.

Our walking tour took us inland in search of giant tortoises. We were told up front that only the young tortoises would be in the lowland whilst the older ones would be up the highlands. What they meant by young was around 10 and 20 years of age, the older ones live to over 100 years old. Not too long into our walk we came across our first tortoise. For being a youngster, it was still a good size at maybe 75cm long. It was a bit shy though and kept it's head inside it's shell. Our next tortoise sighting was not so great, it was just an empty shell - apparently this can happen when they walk through the scrubland and puncture themselves on branches or get stuck.

We saw a land iguana, Galapagos hawk, another two tortoises and a green sea turtle nesting area on our way back to the beach. The really big tortoises escaped us though, still, we at least saw a couple that were huge compared to your average pet tortoise.

Back on the beach, we changed into our wetsuits for our first snorkeling trip from the beach. A few people were having 'fun' trying to get their fins on whilst being buffeted around by the waves. No sooner than our faces were in the water, turtles started to appear as if by magic - there were heaps of them, some of them feeding and others just ambling along as though they had nothing better to do than watch us.

We were getting quite used to sharing the sea with turtles and weren't totally mesmerized by the first one we came across. We could now enjoy looking at the other marine life too, safe in the knowledge that another turtle was most likely just a 'turn of the head' away. There were lots of schools of little fish, some stingrays, pacific box fish, adult and juvenile puffer fish, bumphead parrotfish, cornet fish and even some barracudas.

There were a few penguins and pelican on the rocks watching as we snorkeled past and much to our disappointment, they decided not to put on a feeding display for us.

During lunch, the boat moved to Elizabeth bay for our afternoon tour into the mangroves. There was no landing, we were just taken round in the dinghy to see the resting places of sea turtles and rays. Once again, we were overloaded with turtles - some lazily gliding past us in the shallow water while others were poking their heads up to breath nearby. We came across an enormous stingray, about 150cm across, resting on the sea floor. A couple of flicks with it's wings and it gently glided off, slowly enough for us to follow it's graceful flight. A few smaller eagle rays added to our marine life count but there were no sea lions resting on tree trunks as we hoped - that would have made a great photo.

Instead of going straight back to the boat after leaving the mangroves, we made our way out and round a large rock or maybe it was a small island, but it was crammed full. On one side of the rock, there were loads of blue footed boobies nesting on the pretty much vertical cliff face. As we made our way round, we saw marine iguana s climbing the walls and then a young sealion joined us, playing round the boat and generally showing off for us. On the opposite side to the boobies, the rock was less steep and this was where the penguins hung out.

After the dinghy tour the boat was on the move again, heading to Punta Moreno. We were lucky enough to come across two pods of dolphins. One of them seemed to be racing the boat while the other pod hung around for a while riding the bow wave.