Diving With Giants - The Galapagos Islands

Time for an adventure! We climbed out of bed at 4am and the limo picked us up at 5 for our 7am flight to Miami. Unfortunately we had both gotten a touch of the flu the weekend before and we weren't completely over it yet... we still had two days before diving so we were hopeful that everything would be OK. In Miami we had 4 hours to kill so we went to the Admiral's Club and found some comfortable seats to rest in, so much nicer than the chaotic main terminal!

At 6pm we boarded our flight for Guayaquil Ecuador. Four hours later we arrived, cleared immigration and customs and then boarded the shuttle to our hotel, the UniPark Hotel in downtown Guayaquil. On board we met Sage and her Uncle Jimmy, who were on our boat, the Galapagos Aggressor 2, and Jane and Terrry, who were on the Aggressor 1. We checked in at the UniPark Hotel (which was very nice) and finally got to sleep at around 1:30am. A very long day of traveling!

Trip Info: Flight Map - Dive Site Map - Dive Logs

We woke up at 6am, had breakfast and then took a shuttle to the airport where someone from Aggressor helped us check in for our flight to the Galapagos. We flew on AeroGal (which roughly translates as "Airline of the Screaming Child"). An hour and a half flight later we arrived at the tiny airport on the island of San Cristobal.

We were met by our divemasters, Santiago and Richard. We met the other divers on our boat: Jonatha from Hawaii and Satomi, Mitsu, Mobuka and Madoka from Tokyo. We took a shuttle to the town dock and then boarded a panga (a 15 foot inflatable boat) out to the Aggressor 2. The boat was 120 feet long with 4 levels. Our room was on the third deck, a nice large room with a private bath and a queen sized bed.

The boat moved to Baltra Island and we headed down to the lounge for a trip briefing with Santiago. The rest of the ship was just as nice as our room, lots of polished wood everywhere and nice comfortable seating. Afterwards we headed to the dive deck, at the back of the second deck and set up our gear. They attached collapsable flags and emergency locator radios to our BCs and added an air powered horn to our inflator hoses. It was all just in case, but it was nice to know they were really looking out for us, no matter what conditions we encountered.

Then we hopped in the water off the back of the boat for a checkout dive. We were diving with warm gloves and 7mm suits and hoods which were much thicker than we were used to. We ended up needing 15 pounds of extra weight each!

On the dive the visibility was extremely low, maybe 6 feet; the sea lions that came over to play with us were longer than the visibility! It wasn't a big deal, since we were just making sure that we had the weight right and that our gear was all set up properly.

Back on board we had the first of many great meals and some tasty dessert. The warm humid air was making both of us feel much better and we were becoming more confident that we'd be able to make all of the dives after all!