No need to worry about safety here; tourist police, local police (some with swords!), national police, and soldiers with automatic weapons were found on most corners. While I did feel safe, I was curious as to why there was such a need for this kind of protection…..
AM flight on AeroGal brought me to the island of San Cristobel where I would meet the team for the 7 night live aboard. The flight over was packed with elementary school kids on their way to a field trip. I went to the zoo as a fourth grader, these kids get to go to the fricken GALAPAGOS!
Pics of the Galapagos are in the Photos section!
Turns out I am in the low season so there are now more staff than guests on the boat! 8 guests; a couple from the UK, an Aussie on a 6 month tour, a dive instructor from the Kona boat in the same company, a producer of wild life content for NHK from Japan, and a mother daughter team from North Carolina. We all had our own suites with private shower and TV. Nice digs.
Day 1
The check out dive was off the coast in 15 feet of water so we could check out our gear and get used to diving in 7MM wetsuits. Water temp: 68 degrees. Chilly. We were joined on the dive by a group of 8 sea lions that were amazingly playful. The more you played with them, the closer they got. I had one adolescent sea lion mesmerized by me doing the YMCA dance…..who is the smarter of the two species now?
Amazing sunset followed by a BBQ on the top deck. Best story of the night was H from Australia telling us that he was kicked out of a bar for telling his joke about how his head could withstand the pressure of 4 atmospheres, and that if the (large) bartender wanted to go home with him, he would be happy to pleasure her….classy guy at the first dinner! Turned out to be a righteous dude!
Slept like a baby until 5 AM until the anchor was let go about a foot from my head.
Day 2
After breakfast I walked out on to the deck just in time to see a minke whale breach. GOOD MORNING! The whale and its baby kept breaching all through the morning dive brief. We all knew we were in store for some special diving.
Two dives today. Sharks, rays, eels, sea lions, huge schools of fish. Very cool. Nature walk on North Seymour Island. Magnificent Frigates (not just my opinion!), marine and land iguanas (some even living together! Oh the scandal!), blue footed boobies (OH how I love looking at boobies!) and more sea lions. Very interesting! Only in the Galapagos.
Sitting now on the second deck listening to Jimmy Buffet watching the sea lions leap over the waves. I could be working.
Perhaps a nap in the hammock before dinner? Or maybe a soak in the hot tub?
Decisions decisions.
Day 3
We steamed 16 hours through the night and arrived at Wolf Island at about 8 AM. Wolf Island is on the north west corner of the Galapagos Islands. It is a whale shaped island and is home to about 1,000,000 birds including seagulls, red footed boobies (more boobies!!), frigates and smaller coastal birds. The island shoots up from the ocean to about 700 feet with most of the island sheer cliffs of rock turned white from the bird poop (not the scientific term!).
As I walked out on to the deck the water was like a lagoon and dolphins were breaching all around the boat. Thousands of birds were in view in every direction at all levels on the island up to 2000 feet above the cliffs. There are no species of animals that have been introduced to this island, so all of the birds, fur seals, marine iguanas and other life all found there way here over the last 100,000 years. Quite a feat considering the closets piece of land is over 500 miles away!
We dove 4 dives today. Not much to see, just HAMMERHEAD SHARKS!!!!!!! A school of about 15 hammerheads circled around our spot for about 30 minutes. They were about 6- 8 feet long, and it was my first time to see a hammerhead after over 150 dives so I was pretty excited. My dive buddy Masa from Tokyo and I were circled by two 7 foot Galapagos sharks for 5 minutes and they got pretty close which made us a little nervous. We were told that all of the sharks in the area are not aggressive as they are not hunted, but that did not do much to calm me as the lords of the sea eyed us and moved on.
We also saw a school of bonito (kind of tuna) that swirled around us like a tornado, about a dozen turtles, parrot fish, fur seals that came down to play, dozens of moray eels, and a red lipped bat fish which literally looked like a bat!
We sipped cold Ecuadorian pilsner beers and smoked cigars on the top deck at sunset and watched the birds do their thing while the fur seals jumped and the turtles basked on the calm surface catching the last rays of the setting sun.
Time for dinner and a movie in the salon. I can not wait for what awaits us tomorrow!
Day 4
The anchor was raised at 4 AM. The anchor is only 6 feet from my head. Oh well, the early bird finds the whale shark, which is really what I am after. The whale shark is neither a member of the shark nor the whale family, but feeds on only plankton, and can get to be over 60 feet long, hence the whale part of the name. I have yet to see one, but am very very eager to find one in the perfect conditions that exist in this part of the world.
We anchor again at Darwin Island, only 20 miles north of where we were at Wolf. Darwin is similar to Wolf in that it is a rock in the middle the ocean with only the top of the volcano showing. The real fun is under the water.
We were in the water by 7 and were greeted on the zodiacs out to the dive site by three different pods of jumping dolphins, some easily clearing 6 feet in the air. We dove deep on the first dive to over 28 meters or 100 feet hoping to find more sharks. Oh boy did we find more sharks, of the hammerhead species. LOTS of them, and today they came closer. Hammers are funny in that they can not see well up or down so they saunter up to you and when they realize that you are not something they want to eat, they shrug you off. I swear I could hear some of them grunting a HMMPH at me when they realized I was not enticing enough as a nice ray or a moray eel for them to have a snack on.
4 dives today where we found LOTS of morays, including an Albino moray which is quite rare, yellow peppered puffer fish, a HUGE school of jacks that circled us, and the grand prize; a SCHOOL of Hammerhead Sharks!! The school was well off the wall of the reef, and was at about 20 meters. It was easily 12 sharks deep from top to bottom evenly spaced (each shark is about 2-3 feet thick) and 7 – 8 sharks wide. The School took up all of my mask length wise, so I would count over 100 hammerheads in the school. Truly an amazing site. Check the pictures!!!
I sat in the Jacuzzi with a beer watching the frigate birds chase the finches (not a fair fight!) and the dolphins continue their quest for a new world record in the high jump, while the fur seals barked us a good night, and I wondered whether tomorrow would give us the chance to see the elusive whale shark!
Day 5
The last day at Darwin Island, and we are again in the water early. First dive brings us more hammers and a deep dive. I was headed up to my safety stop with my air gauge reading 50 BAR and right on top of the red zone for air quantity, when our dive master started frantically banging his tank and pointing straight down. I knew something was up as I followed him straight down from 10 meters to 30 meters (30 feet to 110 feet). Walter had found us a Whale Shark, and a big one at that.
45 feet long, 12 feet wide and a tail that was easily 7 feet high moving gracefully through the water. I chased it, camera in hand and was going to go deeper but my regulator (the mouth piece you breathe through) started to make a loud honking sound every time I took a breath. Could it have something to do with the fact that my gauge was now reading 30 BAR? For those of you who don’t dive, 30 BAR means I have about 10 minutes of air left, basically a situation that one should never be in, especially when you are 100 feet under water. Did I panic? No. Did I question what the hell I was doing? Abso-fricken-lutely. BUT, I wanted to see a whale shark….
After my safety stop, I got on the boat with under 20 BAR, maybe 5 minutes of air left. I promised myself that I would not do that again. BUT, check the pictures of the whale shark. ‘nuf said.
Little did I know that one of our team decided to do the same as me, go down to see the whale shark with little air. Only difference is that he ran out of air. Again, HE RAN OUT OF AIR at 110 feet and had to do an emergency accent. This is a move where you drop you weights and swim as fast as humanly possible to the surface, humming as you go so your lungs don’t explode. Turns out he made it to the surface, shooting 3 feet out of the water, and missing his safety stop. They rushed him back to the boat, grabbed another tank and sent him back down to do his safety stop. This is one lucky man. One lucky man. My accent was quicker than normal so I sat in the salon after the dives breathing straight O2 for 10 minutes just to be safe.
We took another 3 dives today trying to find the whale shark with no luck. Four of the group did not see the whale shark so we were all hoping to get that final glance.
We weighed anchor around 1 PM and took off for a 20 hour steam back to the south. I watched movies most of the afternoon, and fell asleep around 8 PM. A very good night sleep.
DAY 6
We woke around 7 AM today and jumped in the water at cousin’s rock to look for the little critters under the rocks and around the coral fans. We found rock fish and frog fish as well as sea horses. Sea Horses are much much bigger than I thought they would be. Very Cool.
The second dive was against a strong current, and I decided not to follow the team that seemed to be on a mission to go against the current. I blew through my air tank, and had to go up early and rose into the current. When I finally broke water I was in the middle of a channel heading north away from the boat and from the dinghy. I waved and raised my flag, and even blew the safety whistle with no luck in getting the attention of the driver. The boat and rocks were steadily getting further away so I decided to turn on my distress beacon that each diver was given at the start of the tour. I found out later that the signal was picked up on the bridge and an alarm did sound. From that the captain radioed the dinghy and they started looking for me. Only 15 minutes alone in the deep. Long enough to make me think about possible endings to this story, some did not have a happy one….but at the end of the day, we all made it back on board.
The afternoon put us back on dry land for a tour of Bartalome island which is basically made of lava flows that rise up out of the water to about 700 feet. There is a lookout point that we walked up to with an amazing view of the bays below us. This was one of the locations for Master and Commander staring Russell Crow. Very beautiful.
We snorkeled with Penguins later that afternoon (why wouldn’t you?) and watched the DVD of the weeks dives on the boat.
Tomorrow we head to the Darwin Center to view the giant turtles, have dinner in town and then catch our flights back to Quito.
Day 7
One dive today in what turned out to be called ‘the washing machine’. This was the strongest current I have ever been in. The current streams through a channel between two large rocks which creates amazingly strong up, down and bi directional currents. We crossed the channel between the rocks and I was a little nervous to see the bubbles of my dive buddy going DOWN in a strong down current. These are conditions where people loose it. We literally had to rock climb in all our gear up and over one of the underwater rock walls. Easily the toughest and most dangerous conditions I have ever been in.
We packed up our dive gear and headed to the Darwin center to hang with the giant tortoise, including lonesome George. George is the last of his species of Giant Tortoise, and there is a $25K reward for finding a female that he will mate with!
Amazing animals, some that weigh over 500 lbs and could well be over 200 years old. Sadly they are in a very bad state as they were taken to the brink of extinction in the 1800’s by whalers and pirates for their oil and meat. Seems they can live without food or water for a year, and they stack well, so ships loaded their cargo holds with them, and left the goats, dogs and cows on the islands, which then destroyed the habitat for the tortoises, for a double whammy.
The pictures, video and stories don’t offer even a step in the direction of justice to the pristine and almost prehistoric beauty of the Galapagos Islands. What we saw as a group of strangers will stay not only in my mind and heart, but will be with me in every conversation I have, every encounter with a friend or acquaintance, every opinion I foster going forward will look back on the experiences we had in Ecuador.
Thank you to the staff of the Aggressor, and may there always continue to be ‘no footsteps on the islands’
And may George get a piece of tail soon!