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Galapagos: Scuba Diving and One More Day Trip
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Once we got off the boat we made our way to Puerto Ayora, the main town on Isla Santa Cruz. Though we were sad to be off our cruise we were excited to explore on our own, and our first big activity was to go diving at the world famous Gordon Rocks on the eastern side of the island. The Gordon Rocks are giant pillars that jut out of the water about 1 mile offshore and there are strong currents that rip in between them, thereby creating the perfect situation for sharks. Here is a picture of the site above water:
This site is famous for Hammerhead sharks which is what we came to find. About 5 minutes into the first dive we spotted our first hammerhead. It was huge and slowly swam by us before disappearing into the blue. It then took a few more minutes before we found a seen that looked just like this (although we didn´t have as good of visibility as this picture):
It was exhilirating to finally see these sharks up close and personal. We did see one in Egypt in Dahab, but it was farther away. We had about 8 in this group and they were quite close. They swam by for a while and then a huge school of giant barracuda swam by, followed by turtles and sea lions. It was an amazing dive. We also saw huge moray eels and lots of fish, but the sharks were the main attraction.
After the first dive we were brought over to a calm bay in between two other islands nearby and the 4 of us on the dive trip got to snorkel with a family of sea lions for about 40 minutes. It was amazing. The sea lions were so playful, and would dart all around us, even pretending to charge right at us and then at the very last second change direction while blowing a huge breath of bubbles 6 inches from Amy´s face. She screamed in laughter numerous times. They were so curious and it seemed they had as much fun swimming with us as we did with them. During the second dive we saw more barracuda but the sharks were gone, so we felt blessed to see as many as we did during the first dive.
The next day we decided to visit another island, North Seymour, which is famous for it´s mating frigate birds. The male birds are black but have an inflatable sack on their neck that they inflate to draw in the females, and it´s quite impressive. We also saw many more booby birds, land iguanas, marine iguanas, an sea lions.
In all we had an amazing time seeing what God has created and orchestrated survival for on the Galapagos islands. It actually felt a bit like what earth was probably supposed to be like in the first place as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible, where everything lived together and not in fear of each other. We are currently not aware of anywhere else on earth that has the same natural opportunities to experience nature in this way.
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