Tiburones!

At the crack of dawn, I wolfed down a nice fruit/pancakes/scrambled eggs/ham breakfast at the hotel and wondered down to dive center Scuba Iguana. There I met my fellow diver for the day, an Irish accountant named Eodh (pronounced more or less like the letter "E"), who´d been sitting outside the dive center for an hour already due to a timezone SNAFU. We were soon greeted by our divemaster Paulo, who showed us some underwater footage to whet our appetites, then walked us through a couple of options for today´s divesite. Both E and I decided we prefer big animals, so ended up heading to Seymour Isle - two divesites, Mosquenas and The Canal.

After my experiences with an unnamed dive operator in Mexico, I had assumed safety and conservation standards would be pretty lax, but I have to say Scuba Iguana turned out to be one of the most professional outfits I´ve ever dived with. We pre-fitted all gear the day before, the crew took care of all transportation of the gear, everything was on time... We even had to do a quick skills demo (mask clearing and recovering a lost reg) before getting on with the actual dives. Paulo was very knowledgeable about the local marine life, and explained beforehand what we could expect to see, and told us NOT TO TOUCH ANYTHING (big difference to the guys in Mexico). He also informed us that an on-the-spot credit card payment would be required to get access to his octopus if either one of us ran out of air due to not paying attention to the air pressure gauge :-) We were told the water would be cold, so wore 7mm wetsuits (and Paulo actually used a dry suit), but honestly, compared to diving lakes back in Finland, the Galapagos felt like a frigging hot spring. Guess everything is relative...

With all that out of the way, we started our first dive. Three sea lions provided a warm welcome, playfully swimming around us from the moment we hit the water. They may look clumsy above water, but under the surface they are insanely agile. Their routine involves zipping toward divers at high speed and turning away at the last possible moment - I was sure they were going to collide with me on a couple of occasions. They also look very cute with their long whiskers and puzzled expressions when they see neon yellow fins on their playmates... The sea lions chased us for a while after we started swimming away, but eventually got bored and departed.

We, however, were never at a risk of getting bored. Pretty soon after the sea lions, I spotted my first ever hammerhead shark. It was maybe 15 meters below us, and didn´t seem to detect or mind our presence. Still, the easily recognizable silhoutte made a heck of an impression. The shark was visible for maybe 5-10 seconds until it swam outside the range of our visibility. There was more to follow - we caught a cavalcade of sea turtles, black and white tip reef sharks, a few nudibranches, and an interesting new (to me) critter: garden eels. They look like a long, thin worm that sticks out from the bottom of the seabed, holding their mouths open like their more intimidating cousins, moray eels. When approached, they withdraw into the sand. What made them impressive was the sheer number - there were thousands of them around! At first I actually thought they were some kind of grassy algae, not animals. A bunch of sea stars seemed to enjoy the company of the garden eels.

The second dive of the day brought some more sharkey excitement. While we spotted a total of two hammerheads on the first dive, we caught a school of 7 or 8 of them swimming together on the second. Also saw a few individual hammerheads, and a couple of groups of 2-3. We also came across a bizarre sight: 5-6 white tips apparently sleeping (although with their eyes open) under a rock formation. They were completely still, and didn´t mind even when we approached to within easy touching distance - we were maybe 20cm from their tail fins! A couple of them did wake up and spurt out of the cave, right above our heads. Quite an exciting moment, even knowing that white tips are completely harmless. We had pretty strong currents on this second dive, so hung on to rocks for support a lot, and finished with some high speed drift diving on our way back to the boat.

The excitement didn´t stop there, however. Right after we headed home, we got a distress call on the boat´s radio. The crew went into an excited, high-speed exchange in Spanish, and left E and me wondering what is going on. Eventually Paulo explained that one of the divers on a nearby liveaboard, Estrella Del Mar, had drowned during a dive! They were trying to resuscitate the poor guy, and asked nearby boats to stay close in case they needed assistance. So we cruised in a circle pattern (we couldn´t stay still without setting anchor, due to the currents and choppy sea) for about an hour, and actually helped by picking up one of Estrella´s divers who had gotten separated from her buddy and DM. She apparently had no idea that someone on her boat was close to dying, as she started cheerfully explaining her diving experience to us - we didn´t know enough about the situation, so said nothing until we dropped her off back at her yacht. We then helped some more by towing one of Estrella´s rib boats that had suffered an engine failure (seriously, how many mishaps can one boat have in a day?) back to the yacht. Shortly after this, we heard on the radio the CPR had failed and the passenger had died. This cast kind of a gloomy mood on our return to harbor. We still don´t know exactly what happened, although I suspect the diver had some kind of a stroke or seizure; it´s very hard for a healthy person to drown on a dive otherwise. I guess we´ll read about it in tomorrow´s news.

After the dive, I grabbed dinner at Cafe Hernan: grilled fish and a large frosty beer. Basic but delicious. The TV was on, and not surprisingly, the main topic was the US election, going on as I write this. I´m keeping my fingers crossed that Obama wins, but there is no way I´m staying up to hear the final result. In keeping with the theme of the week, I´m getting up at 5am (!) to get a boat to Bartolome Isle. Tomorrow we´re not diving, but actually walking around on land. There should be a chance to see some penguins on the island, so looking forward to that!