Diving at the End of the Earth

The alarm went off at the early hour of 3am, the start of a long trek to the Galapagos! The trip had been planned for 2 years, the furthest in advance we'd ever scheduled a trip, but it's necessary as that's about how far in advance the dive boats fill up!

The limo took us to SFO where we met our friend Tim who would join us on the trip. We flew American Airlines and had a five hour flight to Miami, a four hour layover, then a four hour flight to Guayaquil, Ecuador. We took the shuttle to the Hilton Colon Guayaquil where we had a nice suite. It was about 11pm by the time we got there, we went promptly to sleep.

We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, pretty standard except for the ceviche which Rick and Tim were excited about. Back to the airport for an hour and a half flight to San Cristobal in the Galapagos on AeroGal Airlines. 

Once there we collected our luggage and met Walter, one of our dive masters from our boat, the Galapagos Aggressor 1, and the other divers for the week: First was a group of 8 consisting of Diane & Kit from Grand Junction, their daughter Karlee from Los Angeles, their son Stefan from Virginia, Diane's sister Patrice from Maui, Jill & Rick, also from Grand Junction and their son Gabe. Ken was from Belvedere Island (north of San Francisco) and Maxim and Sergey were from Russia. We boarded a shuttle and took a quick trip to the harbor where we hopped on a panga (inflatable boat, like a zodiak) for a ride to the Aggressor. On board we had a safety briefing, then set up our gear.

The boat moved to San Cristobal Island where we did our check-out dive. We took 24 pounds of weight each since we were both diving with 7mm suits and hoods. On the dive we saw some sea lions that were good targets for checking out the cameras. Rick had the same video camera he had used in the Bahamas, Randy had a new Panasonic GF-1 in a compact aluminum housing. Both worked well.

After the dive we had dinner on the top deck and headed to the room early to get some sleep.