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GALAPAGOS HOLIDAY CONTINUES:
And now it's our last day. This is David, coming to you live from an e-mail. Today I had the best two dives of my life so far. They were both at a place called Enderby, which is a small island (or large rock) off Floriana. I went with an outfit called Scuba Iguana which is well known locally and which I can thoroughly recommend. Their safety standards were high, the equipment all worked well, and they even had the big 15 litre tanks which make such a difference if you are a bit of an air-guzzler like me.
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 Dive boat Iguana |
The boat from where we were staying (Santa Cruz) took a bit under two hours to do the fifty or so miles separating the two islands so it was not hanging around! One of those twin outboard launches that jumps out of the water every time it hits a wave. There were seven divers including me, five male, two female. Two of the men were seasick on the way out but with my special pills bought locally I was fine. | |
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They organized a practice dive in shallow water first and got us all to repeat some of the PADI safety procedures to prove that we were competent. Things like taking off your mask and replacing and clearing it underwater, removing and recovering your regulator and what-not. That was all fine but used up about ten minutes of precious tank air. While we were doing these exercises young sealions buzzed us and tried to divert our attention. It was a scene straight out of Walt Disney. Because of slight problems with buoyancy control and the need to follow instructions and communicate with the other divers, not to mention the sheer interest of what was going on all around me, I didn't take as many photographs as usual and the ones I did take were disappointing. The really interesting stuff wasn't quite close enough to give good results and in retrospect I think I shouldn't have used the flash, which gave a lot of back-scatter from suspended particles. So the photos below are mostly library pictures again, but of stuff that I did in fact see on one or other of the two dives. |
 Green back turtle (male) |
On the first (real) dive we saw an astounding number and variety of fish, but the highlight was a group of white-tip reef-sharks about a metre and a half long that circled us in close formation, a manoeuvre that means "this is our feeding ground, not yours. Eat any of our fish and there is going to be trouble." We didn't eat any and hence were able to remain friends. As well as the sharks we saw numerous turtles (in fact they were present all the time, you just had to look up to see them) and large schools of fish keeping tight formation due to the presence of the sharks and changing direction suddenly as one animal. |
 White-tip shark We saw one large shoal of barracuda pass overhead. Each fish was about half a metre long, which is in fact a lot smaller than a similar shoal I saw in Florida but still pretty impressive. |  Shoal of barracuda |
| We also played with a young octopus and saw a scorpion fish (very venomous as its name suggests) and a large moray eel (about a six-footer). |
 Large moray eel |
 Common octopus |  Scorpion fish |
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In fact there were so many different kinds of fish I can't remember or describe half of them. It was as dense with fish life as the Red Sea, which was the previous high point (doesn't sound quite right in this context) of my diving career, but we never saw sharks there, or turtles. |
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Enderby turned out to be such a good site that after lunch (chicken in gravy with rice) we elected to return to the same place instead of moving on to the second planned dive site. This was a good decision as this time it was a group of Galapagos Sharks, about three times bigger than the white-tips, that circled us. There were also more of them. There had been about ten or eleven in the formation of white tips but somebody counted twenty-seven of the Galapagos. |  Group of Galapagos sharks |
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The only local shark variety that we didn't see was the hammerhead. That was just luck of the draw. As well as the sharks on the second dive we saw three different kinds of ray, common sting ray, marbled ray (the only one without a tail) and a big formation of golden coloured eagle rays swimming past like a formation of flying carpets. There are probably lots of other things we saw but the whole experience was a bit overwhelming and I didn't manage to keep a detailed count. Galapagos has a bad reputation among divers, for sudden and unpredictable currents, thermoclines and doubtful visibility. That was why every diver going out had to be re-tested on the basic safety procedures. In fact we encountered nothing, except a few sharks of course, and I was at all times more concerned with the dangers from my wet suit than from them. There are sheltered bays where novice divers can go in the islands, and those are still very good dives. If you are considering a diving holiday in the area don't be put off by rumours that they won't even take you out unless you have fifty logged dives and the PADI Advanced Certificate. Not true. The only annoyance I had was with that very heavy wetsuit that they make you wear. I found buoyancy control a bit difficult because of the thick (7mm) material. It's like swimming around inside a bathroom sponge. The problem is that as soon as you deflate the BCD to go down the material of the suit starts to compress, so your overall body volume becomes less and the descent accelerates and becomes quite tricky to control. The same happens in reverse on the way up, which of course is much more dangerous. The same effect happens with normal BCD operation but it's a lot less pronounced. I was able to get up and down safely from 25 metres, but only with a lot of concentration and a few hairy moments. The silly thing is that the water temperature never dropped below 20 degrees, which for me is warm and I didn't need any wet suit at all, let alone a 7 mm one. I am just not accustomed to diving in thick cold water wet suits. Sorry if I have bored a lot of you with the technicalities of diving. I'll just finish by saying that it was a wonderful day for me, and I couldn't have hoped to see more creatures in two 45 minute dives. I'll hand over to Jean now. It's me now. Jean. My day wasn't so exciting. I hired a bike for the morning and rode up into the hills and through farmland. It was a bit cloudy and had been raining during the night which is pretty unusual at this time of the year, so although it was warm and hard work it wasn't too bad. I then came back, had lunch and went and sat on a little beach near our hotel. That's about it really. Tomorrow we leave the Galapagos and the next day fly to London. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone but not really looking forward to leaving the warmth - the weather here has been lovely. Not as hot as I expected being on the Equator but just pleasant. Jean. And so ends my absolute best holiday so far, the one I don't think I'm ever going to be able to top. But who knows what the future holds, all things are possible. Alien abduction, perhaps... David. |