Galapagos Diving and/or Snorkeling

Late afternoon Dec. 3 flamingoes:



Moon over red sand beach just before sunset:

Yes that’s a sea lion on the beach.

Sea lion hung out by every boat dock.

Early morning walk Dec. 5 was on Espanola in the far south.

Marine iguanas here had more red color.


Here’s one above a baby sea lion.


Ghost crab excavating burrow:


Black necked stilt:


Albatrosses:


Nazca booby with chick:

Not many places you can walk through a nesting area like this.

This is a collapsed magma chamber on Santa Cruz.

The highlands are lush from chronic fog and more rain. Low elevation islands only get about 5 inches rain per year.

On departure morning we passed Kicker Rock near San Cristobal.

If you stay on San Cristobal, Kicker Rock is the local dive site for hammerheads.

Snorkeling video 1:28 with sea lions, Dec. 5:

32k miles plus 100 bucks for a round trip to Ecuador is a steal. You definitely saved enough on the flight to offset those cruise prices. Have a great time in Santa Cruz.

lexi376 said:

You definitely saved enough on the flight to offset those cruise prices.

Click to expand...

Uh, no. The cruise was $8K per person. Small expedition boats are expensive, as in Antarctica. In both cases only small groups can land in order to minimize environmental impact. The Galapagos have cheaper options though. You can do 3-4 day cruises instead of a whole week. Or you can be land based on Santa Cruz or San Cristobal as we were for the two days before the cruise for diving. Daytrips are offered to some of the closer islands. But you see more the way we did it. Every day on the cruise has two land excursions plus an hour of snorkeling.

Divemaster video clips of hammerheads at Gordon Rocks:
Visibility was so-so and the video is very hazy at any distance. Our first sighting was swimming over about 10 of them. The opening clip has two in the haze. The final clip is the clearest.

Snorkeling pics are from the point-and-shoot Olympus Tough camera, as was the sea lion video above.

Turtles are seen on occasion on many scuba dives, but nowhere have I seen as many at one time as here.

That's Liz' nauticam at upper left and 7 turtles in total.

Taking a breath:


Light angle here made this turtle look red.


A highlight of the Galapagos are the endemic marine iguanas. Here is one next to a snorkeler with our boat MV Evolution in the background.


They usually swim on the surface.


Except when they feed on algae.


Emerging from the water:


Penguins at left and center, a mess of iguanas on the right:

I did see penguins underwater a few times but they were too fast to get pics. Their side flippers stick out as stationary stabilizers like fish.

Flightless cormorant:

I saw one of these underwater too but missed the pic.

Pufferfish:


Endemic horn shark:


The Galapagos are the easternmost habit of this marble ray.

I had to dive down to get a better look. I found this extremely difficult fighting wetsuit buoyancy. Cool season water was 68F in the NW and 72 central and south.

School of surgeonfish by a wall:

We saw these cleaning turtle shells a few times.

Giant Hawkfish, only found in tropical eastern Pacific.


Above water scenery:


Close up sea lion:


In the NW on the first two days our guides occasionally saw thin dorsal fins above the water and suspected mola mola. They are usually in open water and thus rarely seen by divers or snorkelers. At the end of our second day snorkel our guide spotted one near the rocks and jumped back in, followed by one of our alert guests. I grabbed my mask, jumped in but was way behind them because I did not put my fins back on. I arrived just before the mola mola swam away, thus this hazy picture.

Liz missed this but says she will give that pic some Photoshop work. I previously saw a mola mola at 160 feet at Nusa Pineda, an island off the SE side of Bali in 2012.