Seymour/Gordon Rocks dive

Since Alyssa and Brad do not dive, I signed up for a dive with "Scuba Iguana" that would take me to two sites: North Seymour and Gordon Rocks. I had read in all of the reviews that Gordon Rocks was the best place in the Galápagos to dive and we had planned the dates we were coming so that I could dive that site. I needed to be at the dive shop at 7:30, so I got up early so that I could get packed up, grab something to eat and walk the twenty minutes to the other side of town. Sadly, I had forgotten that it was Sunday and that nothing would be open to grab coffee or a snack. After trying multiple places, I finally gave up and headed to the dive shop. It was a cold, misty day and I could tell that we'd be in for some rain later.
The dive master went over our plan for the dive and strangely enough, we had to take a 45 minute taxi ride to the other side of the island to catch our boat. There was a couple from Australia in my taxi who had been traveling for 2 1/2 years and were very interesting to talk to. The 9 divers and 3 crew members boarded our small boat with all of our gear and headed out to North Seymour first. Before arriving, the crew insisted that we get fully suited up and do a dive test before our initial dive. This included getting water into your mask and then clearing it and losing your regulator and recovering it. I thought it was a bit ridiculous since we were all certified and I'd never had to do this on a dive before. The nice thing though was that they insisted on setting up all of your gear and helping you put it on. Normally this would annoy me but I figured they wanted to haul around my heavy tank, that was just fine! Haha
Once we had completed the dive test, we headed over to North Seymour. The water was much rougher there, so we had to be ready to go. Once in the water, I was once again struck by how cold it was. I was wearing a full wetsuit with boots and hood, but it still took my breath away. The fact that there was no sun to warm you up didn't help either. On this first dive, I was a little disappointed since there was no reef and hardly any fish; really just a sandy bottom. I realized after a while that you just needed to wait for the larger animals to appear- that was the appeal. I saw tons of manta rays, sea lions and sea turtles which was cool. The water is not very clear, there is probably only a 10-15ft visibility which also made it challenging. After the first dive, we headed over to Gordon rocks. During our surface time, we had a lunch of fish ceviche with banana chips and surprisingly, the fish ceviche was very good.
When it was time to get in for our second dive, the water was raging around us so we needed to be completely geared up and positioned on the edges of the boat to all deploy simultaneously so that the boat could get out of there ASAP. The waves were throwing us into the rocks even once we had descended so I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to keep away from the rocks and the other less experienced divers who kept crashing into me. Although this water was also very turbid, the great thing about this location is that it always has hammerhead sharks. I had never seen one before and was excited to see some in person. I got to see three different ones- one of them swam head on right towards me and I started to wonder if I should panick or not. They were harmless though and just carried on with what they were doing. We saw tons of eagle rays and manta rays and watched them swim above us in a group of at least 100- it was like watching birds fly overhead. It was a pretty interesting dive.
After the second dive, we headed back to Santa Cruz. Luckily this time the boat could drop us off right at the dive shop so we didn't need to take a taxi back across town. We congregated in the dive shop to look at the pictures our guide had taken of our dive. They were selling a disk of the pictures for $25 but since I can't upload a disk to my ipad I figured I would just have to get by with my memories.
I headed back to the hotel to meet up with Brad and Alyssa but I was so cold from the dives and it had begun to rain, so I ducked into a coffee shop to try and warm myself up. After the rain stopped, I finished my walk back, took a warm shower and met up with Alyssa and Brad to get dinner. We headed back to the street with all the seafood kiosk and found one that specialized in Caribbean food. The food was good although the people who worked there acted as if they really didn't want to serve us.

After dinner, we headed back to "The Rock" to get some drinks. There were a lot more people there than there were the night before. The price of things like Whiskey or Baileys on the islands is astronomical (a bottle of Jack Daniels is $82 and a bottle of Baileys is $59) so our drinks were a little extravagant and one was enough. We grabbed some gelato at the local deli and headed back to the hotel.

Posted with Blogsy