This morning saw a trip to Urbina Bay, notable in the main for two things - a healthy population of land iguanas and until 1952 it was 10m under water. A volcanic eruption put pay to that. A Disney film crew happened to be in the area at the time and shot a video showing sharks and other sea creatures flapping around on dry land, but this can only be seen in the Charles Darwin Centre on Santa Cruz Island, so we missed that. If anyone can find it on YouTube...

So a pleasant walk, several land iguanas, several giant tortoises (completely in the wild this time), large chunks of dead coral reef on dry land, and a handful of sea lions on the shoreline.

A snorkel off the beach afterwards revealed yet more turtles, a green lobster and a small Galapagos Bullhead Shark (otherwise known as a Port Jackson Horn Shark). And of course loads of other fishes.

We then headed up the coast to Tagus Cove for some after lunch kayaking, however Darwin casually mentioned that he'd spotted a pod of dolphins. Would we rather go and swim with them? Erm, yes.

We approached the pod of around 20 common dolphins and everyone jumped in. I followed and spotted one straight away in the clear depths below me. Except it seemed to be alone, swimming rather slowly, and looked a lot like a shark. It was a shark. A seven foot Galapagos Shark a little too close for comfort! However it didn't seem to be interested and so I figured the best thing to do was ignore it too and catch up with the group and the dolphins - I remembered hearing that dolphins sometimes protect humans from sharks...

Darwin didn't seem too perturbed by the sharks (it turned out Denny had seen two of them) however the rest of the group was a little taken aback when one came right up to the panga after we got back in. Anyway, apparently harmless unless provoked and we didn't see them again.

Swimming with the dolphins was amazing, they were all around us and pretty playful.

However there was a schedule to keep and so we soon headed to a point at the mouth of the cove to try and find penguins to swim with. There were a couple of close encounters, but the absolute highlight was a very playful sea lion. He'd come up to you, a couple of feet away, look you in the eye and wait for you to play. You spin, he spins, you dive down, he follows. He was like an excitable puppy, amazing.

An absolutely fantastic afternoon, the dolphins and the sea lion were probably the highlight of the entire Galapagos trip.