Diving With Giants - The Galapagos Islands

We awoke to find the nine hundred foot cliff face of Wolf Island about 200 feet from the boat. We were on the protected side of the island and it was very calm, though Randy was feeling a bit like the boat was spinning around until just after the first dive. The boat moved to the side of the island and we boarded the pangas. As we dropped down there was a significant amount of current so we found a nice rock to hang on to.

Above us we saw a huge school of hammerheads moving by, and beside us there was a huge school of galapagos sharks. It was like a shark freeway! For the next 30 minutes we watched the sharks swim by, sometimes swimming right up and between us. It was amazing!

During our safety stop we covered quite a bit of distance and surfaced a ways from most of the other divers, who had caught a current going in the other direction. It was the one time that the panga driver wasn't right there, but we signaled our horn twice and he came right over. During the surface interval we took the panga to a cave in the side of the island. The opening was only about 10 feet in diameter, but the cave went back about a hundred yards and got quite a bit larger. We saw some sea lions resting on some rock ledges. Rick and some of the other divers did some snorkeling near the cave entrance.

The next dive we went down expecting to see the shark freeway, but the current has completely vanished and the sharks had all moved elsewhere. It's really funny how fast conditions can change! We floated gently in the current and saw a couple of eagle rays foraging in the rocks. We followed them for a bit, marveling at how graceful they are.

There was one more dive after lunch to see some red lipped batfish, but we decided to skip it. Once everyone was back on board we said goodbye to Wolf and set sail for the central Galapagos.