Wondering Where The Lions Are Wednesday Surf & Culture Report

 

Lost Boys & Co...

So this is the black sand beach on Floreanna (#1).  This was early afternoon and the kids had just gotten out of school, so they flocked to the beach.  There are six of them.  Our bungalow is in the background with the blue tin roof.  LoLa had just been to the market.  At the market they have a limited number of canned goods (corn, sardines, garbanzos and hearts of palm,) in other words the kind of stuff you haven't used in three years and you give to the food drive.  They have mozzarella cheese, which has been treated to have no flavor and the consistency of Silly Putty®, ground corn meal and beer.  If you wanted to have meat loaf, you would be shit-out-of-luck...  On her trip to the store she also stopped by one of the "restaurants."  Restaurants is a perfectly good word, but we put it in parenthesis because these are restaurant-bar-homes-inns.  You have to go by in the morning and announce that you are coming to dinner (if they are open.)  They then tell you what you will be having (usually chicken, meat or fish) and when.  There aren't any places you just pop into to get a beer or sandwich...

Bumped up this morning with variable winds, finally turning onshore about 9am.  Winds will be picking up during the day, forecast to 25mph tomorrow and Friday.  The air temperature was 55.9 and the water is a springlike 61.0.  High tide was at 7:05am +4.4' and low tide is at 1:44pm +0.1'.  We have a west swell out of 267º at 3.6' and it was 3' to almost 4.5' with bumps and some odd rips.  Didn't look great, but you hate to pass up a day with even a ragged swell...  Note:  During the checkout we ran into Kevin "Buffalo" Holmes.  He's now living in Lewiston, Idaho and makes an annual pilgrimage to do some surfing...

Here we have the Professor (#2) pondering his coffee, which was good and much welcomed after a morning snorkel or "snork" as our hostess Ingrid Wittmer put it.  Ingrid was the descendant of one of the first two families that settled Floreanna, the Wittmers.  The water for the coffee comes from the one spring that supplies Floreanna with all of their fresh water.  This is one of the reasons that only a 157 people live on Floreanna.  Just to be safe we ran the water through the blue diatomaceous filter there on the counter and kept it in the fridge so it was cool and tasty.  Ingrid was initially a little reluctant to talk about her family, but after a while she invited us to a small museum she had fashioned out of one of the rooms in the hotel she runs.  Here we read about some of the history including the appearance of a woman who called herself, the Baroness von Wagner Bosquet and her two male companions.  There's a recent documentary called "The Galapagos Affair" which outlines some of the more sordid details, but the bottom line is that she threw the culture of the island into chaos and ended up either missing or dead.  That's where the ghost stories come in...

The bay at Lobeira (#3) is where we did most of our snorkeling on Floreanna.  You hike about three-quarters of the way around the bay, then get in the water and swim out to the point, which isn't that far. There are waves on the point which are predictably lefts.  They were pretty close to the rocks on the days and tides we saw, but they definitely looked rideable.  On this day, as we prepared to have a snork, LoLa put on her fins, waded into the water and as she launched she came straight back out of the water and ran up the beach.  She did one of those great "fins on your feet" runs that look like your wearing clown shoes.  When she could finally talk, she said that she had dove in right over a sting ray!   It was as big as a card table and took off at full speed one way as she went the other.  We discovered that those big rays were pretty common and we saw quite a few in all the places we snorked.  There were also lots of sea turtles, that were as big as we've seen and marine iguanas that would join the turtles snacking on the plants on the rocks...  And yeah, the occasional shark (small)...

Remember it's Greenbelt for Happy Hour on Friday evening...

✠
"When the surf breaks, we'll fix it"
The Professor!!