Diving With Giants - The Galapagos Islands

We awoke to see Wolf Island off the port side of the boat, with Darwin dead ahead. We had breakfast at the usual time, then a dive briefing at 7:30. Around 9:30 we put on our dive gear and boarded the pangas. Darwin is a small island with a large rock arch (Darwin Arch) just offshore. The arch is where all of the diving at this island is done since the current hits it and splits, creating the perfect conditions for large pelagics.

For our first dive we were very excited, not sure of exactly what we'd see, ready for any amount of current, it felt like the first dive of the trip. As we descended the visibility was quite good, close to 100 feet. We dropped down to about 60 feet and all found spots along the wall to hang onto. This was very different diving than we were used to, basically we dropped down and hung on, waiting for big stuff to swim by. We saw a number of hammerheads swimming around, they are really cool looking! We saw some large schools of fish as well as a big turtle.

Back on the surface we rode back to the boat with an amazing feeling of being on a great adventure out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! We postponed lunch and did a 45 minute surface interval to make sure we would get 3 dives for the day. On the second dive we were a little bit more relaxed. We dropped down and hung on, watching the hammerheads. All of a sudden we turned and looked into the current and saw a whale shark! It was about 40 feet long and swimming slowly against the current. We swam over to it and marveled at just how huge it was. Whale sharks eat plankton and don't seem to be bothered by divers at all. We swam alongside for a bit and then it slid away into the current.

We then started to drift with the current. Moving towards us we could see something big and dark. As it got closer it turned out to be a huge ball of 2 foot long tuna and it was headed right for us. We swam into the center of it and all of the fish flowed around us. At one point we were completely surrounded on all sides by thousands of tuna, with the two of us in the center of the ball. It was awesome!

Back on the boat we had lunch and took a short nap. Then it was back out on the pangas and down to the dive site. We saw more hammerheads and a few galapagos sharks, which are a very 'beefy' looking shark. When we surfaced and were heading back to the boat we saw hundreds of dolphins all around us. In every direction for hundreds of yards we watched groups of 6 to 10 dolphins swimming along just below the surface, arching up above the surface every minute or so for air. On board the Aggressor we went up to the bow of the boat and watched the dolphins play in the bow wave while some of the other divers jumped off the pangas to snorkel with the dolphins. It was really amazing to see in the setting sunlight!