Today is scuba day! While
I have been certified for over 27 years, my dive trips have been few and far
between. It has probably been more than
4 years since our last dive, although we were both re-certified in December of
2017. We wanted to do a refresher pool
dive to re-acclimate, but with Covid, we couldn’t find any openings, and thus, hoped
YouTube refresher videos would suffice.
While I love to do cool things, I can get a little panicky when my
comfort level is less than optimal, so, I had been obsessing about this dive
trip.
There was one other couple diving with us – an American
couple from Boulder whom we had met yesterday at La Loberia beach. There were a handful of other people on our boat,
but they were all snorkeling, and none spoke English. Our little foursome was equal in skill level
and we had an awesome guide, Alex, who walked us through everything on the boat
ride to our dive spot. Our location was “Kicker
Rock” – a much eroded former volcano cone that for “scientific reasons” is a
fantastic feeding ground for pretty much everything in the ocean. Kicker Rock is famous for hammerhead sharks,
black tip reef sharks, manta rays, turtles, sea lions, and several other aquatic
critters. We were told that once we got
to Kicker Rock, due to currents and our scheduled allotted time, we would have
to get in the water immediately. I don’t
like to be rushed when I’m nervous.
We donned our gear. The water was supposed to be cold, so we had full wetsuits, booties, gloves, and a stunningly attractive neoprene head cover. On went the fins, mask, weight belt, BCD (buoyancy control device, aka the vest that holds your oxygen and regulator – the thing you breath through), and after a quick gear check, Alex counted to three and we flipped backwards off the boat.
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| Ready to go |
When I panic, I breathe quickly. When you breathe quickly and your lungs stay full of air, you cannot sink, even with a sh*t ton of weight on a weight belt. I went below the surface, panicked, and shot up again. I could not sink. This is not the first time this has happened to me and I had warned Alex. He re-surfaced, took about 15 seconds to calm me down, and then said he was just going to pull me down. Awesome. Ready or not, down we go. It took me a minute, but eventually my breathing slowed to a more normal rate and I started to enjoy myself.
We hung out in the 40-60’ depth looking at and for stuff. Because Kicker Rock is basically a volcano, if we stayed by the wall, there was bottom, but stray from the wall and there was just a huge endless drop-off. The water was murkier than I was expecting – apparently full moon causes swells plus a swift current all stirred up a lot of ocean junk. We did see a lot of colorful fish and we had a few sea lions playing near us, we also saw a sea turtle, a big ray, and tons of huge colorful starfish.
The current was strong, and it was interesting to watch the fish go back and forth in the current. There were times Alex signaled us to “hold on” meaning, grab a rock and try to stay put and see if anything would come to us. Unfortunately, no sharks.
My one moment of excitement on this dive was when Damon, who
was gracefully gliding (flailing) next to me, whipped his arm in my face and
accidentally (?) knocked the regulator out of my mouth. The regulator is what you breath
through. My cat-like reflexes (from
watching all of the “everything that can go wrong while diving” YouTube videos)
kicked in and I did a textbook arm sweep, grabbed my regulator, cleared it of
saltwater, and began breathing normally.
It happened so fast, but thankfully a non-event, other than a good
story.
Damon is a big guy. Big guys use more air. Not surprisingly, Damon ran out of air a lot faster than everyone else. Alex had already discussed a plan for this scenario, and he watched Damon surface and get to the boat while the rest of us stayed down for a few more minutes.
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| My "couple" picture after Damon ran out of air |
When we surfaced, the first thing Alex said after looking at the only boat in sight was “hmm, that’s not our boat”. I’m like, “so where is our boat???” Then I said, “um, so where is Damon???” and Alex pointed to the boat “he is on the wrong boat”. And there we see Damon dangling his feet over the edge of the wrong boat since he surfaced in the wrong place and hopped on the first boat he saw. He jumped back in the water to re-group with us and our boat showed up a minute later and we all ended up in the right place.
For our second dive, the swells were getting big and Alex said that it could be a little bit rough down there, but to just try to go with the current as much as possible. We jumped in (I sunk like a controlled rock this time) and we went hunting for sharks. The water was much murkier this time around with less wildlife, so we spent a lot of time looking at cool stuff in/on the wall – starfish, a moray eel being cleaned by a bunch of shrimp. And then Alex gave the hand signal for a hammerhead sighting. I was a little behind the group and was able to see some shadows of sharks swimming around – maybe 2-3. Damon was closer and got a better look, plus he saw a few more and he also saw the black-tipped reef sharks.
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| What I saw (Hammerheads) |
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| What Damon saw (Black Tipped Reef Sharks) |
I really did want to see more sharks, but as we learned later, it isn’t that they weren’t there, it is that the visibility was not great, and we just couldn’t see them. That is a little creepy. Later, Alex showed us a video from the same spot from a few days earlier, and the hammerheads are part of a school of about a hundred sharks and he said they were most likely nearby.
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| What was most likely around us (picture taken a few days earlier) |
Not surprisingly, Damon ran out of air again, so he breathed from Alex’s tank so we could all stay down longer looking for sharks, but unfortunately, we didn’t see them again.
After our second dive, the boat took us to a nearby secluded
beach and after a nice lunch on the boat, we got to roam the beach and see more
sea lions and a bunch of iguanas. All in
all, a great day.
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| Kicker Rock in the background |
Went back to our room for our daily siesta, got cleaned up and went back to town for a sushi dinner. Hands down best meal we’ve had yet. We learned that Galapagos is famous for fresh tuna, so we had every item on the menu with fresh tuna. Our Boulder friends from the dive were at the same restaurant so we had a chance to chat with them for a bit before we did our evening ritual of watching the sea lions bark and scream at each other on the beach, ogling the adorable babies, cracking up at how sea lions just walk on top of each other’s faces, and then we headed back uphill to our hotel.
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