January 2nd, 2021
I was excited about my second day of diving in the
Galapagos, and definitely wasn’t feeling the nerves that I was two days
prior. I met the other divers, including
my dive buddy Tami, at Academy Bay Diving at 7:10 am and we promptly hopped in
the pickup trucks to drive up to the north end of the island, a repeat from the
other day. However, one difference this
time would be that after we did our two dives at Gordon’s Rocks, the boat would
cruise down to the harbour of Puerto Ayora as they relocate the boat to the south
once a week for upcoming dives at different sites.
Dennis and Valerie were diving again with us but there were
a few new divers including Rob, a retired guy from Arizona, who had to do the
quick checkout dive. After that, we were
on our way to Gordon’s Rocks. Another
new diver (to me at least), was Fabian from Switzerland. He was working on becoming a divemaster and
he and Angel had had an amazing dive at Gordon’s Rocks three days prior with
many hammerhead sharks and giant manta rays up close and personal. He works as a mural artist back home which is
not a very common profession you hear of…interesting guy.
Gordon’s Rocks consists of two primary little islands that
jut out of the ocean about a hundred feet; big rocks really and hence the name.
There were fewer divers today so in my
group it was me and Tami, Fabian and divemaster Angel. Awesome.
Add to that, since Tami and I had both used up our air fairly quickly at
Seymour & Daphne Island the other day, both of us had asked for the bigger
15 liter tank over the standard 12 liter tank…so the worry about sucking up
oxygen too quickly was gone.
Tami and I sat on the edge of one side of the boat, with
Fabian and Angel on the other. Angel
instructed us to put in our regulators, hold our masks with one hand and as
usual said “Have a beautiful dive. One,
two, three, go!” The four of us rolled
backwards and plunged into the water as the boat drifted forward.
The tide was low and so the current wasn’t expect to be too bad. We descended about 30 feet and met up by the wall of the island, grabbing onto the rocks to stay stationary. Angel checked for the OK signal from all of us and we began to work our way along the rockface. There was some current that we were fighting but since you could pull yourself along the rocks, it was relatively easy to make forward progress.
Lotsa fish!
There were lots of fish swimming around. The current seemed to pulse back and forth as we reached the south end of the island. It was super cool to watch all of the fish move a few feet back and forth, although they didn’t seem to are at all. Only 4-5 minutes into our dive, Angel pointed and there it was, my first sighting of a hammerhead shark. It was at a bit of a distance and the visibility was okay but within minutes we saw another, then another. Eventually we had a few close encounters with these awesome, yet strange looking beings.
I found out after the dive that somehow I had missed a
whitetip reef shark that got within a couple of arms length of Tami and
Fabian. It’s crazy how I could miss that
as I was never further than 10 feet from either of them, but the mask does
create a bit of a tunnel vision. We
worked our way around the southern tip of the island and now started to go with
the current.
Eventually it was time to do our safety check at 15’ and
then finish this most amazing dive. While
trying to increase my buoyancy a bit, as I kept sinking to 20’, I pressed the
button quickly to inflate my BCD but then I just felt it blow up
completely. This had happened on the
boat before the dive but the divemasters played with the BCD and said it was
okay. I shot up to the surface, which
wasn’t a big deal as we had been only a minute away from finishing our safety
check, but the vest kept trying to get bigger and bigger and it was compressing
my chest. It does have a bleed off valve
but then the oxygen tank would pump more air into it incessantly. Angel came over and after he finally
understood my communication of the problem, he disconnected the air hose to the
BCD.
Back on the boat, the other group seemed fairly disappointed
with their dive. They had seen one
hammerhead at a distance and that was it.
That’s the luck of the draw of diving.
We had our one hour break with a bit of a snack and then prepared for a
second dive. Thankfully they had a spare
BCD to switch out with my faulty one.
This dive wasn’t quite as good as the first. Before the initial dive, Angel had talked about a few rocky pinnacles between the two islands and we swam away from the island towards them but we were fighting a current so it was slow going. We reached one of the rocky outcroppings, grabbed on and sat and watched for a few minutes to see what we could see. Soon the outline of a hammerhead or two appeared in the water but they were further away than the first dive.
An eel chilling out.
We continued on and reached the other island where the
current was against us, but also was trying to bring us up to the surface so
Tami and I were working hand by hand along the rocks. Probably my highlight of this dive was watching
a sea turtle swimming along slightly faster than we were and it looked as if it
was flying since behind it was just the blue murky water, looking like the
sky. I kept my eye on this lovely guy
for 3-4 minutes.
A soaring sea turtle:
After the dive, it was nice to hear that the other group had had an amazing dive, seeing lots of hammerheads. They definitely deserved it. My only disappointment was that we hadn’t seen any giant manta rays…but wouldn’t you know it, on the boat ride to Puerto Ayora, a few of us saw not one, but two rays jump 3-5 feet out of the water behind the boat. They were pretty far away, but still close enough to tell what they were, and to be amazed by it. Super sweet.
Thank you Galapagos Islands…it was well worth the visit.
No comments:
Post a Comment