Galapagos Islands Dive Trip Report- April 2019
April 6th to 18th, 2019 -13 days/10 nights
This trip was truly a trip of a lifetime.
The Galapagos Islands Dive Trip was in April 2019. It wasn’t a cheap, but worth every bit of it to get to this remote location. This is a trip that would be something you talk of doing one day, well..that day came for us and was fantastic!
The Galapagos Master is a live-aboard that caters specially for divers, spending the time at locations around the islands that offer the best diving. Locations like Darwin and Wolf offer spectacular site of schooling Hammerheads and Pelagics, along with a chance of Mola-Mola (Sunfish) at Isla Isabela, on the time of the year we did it. The Galapagos Master has only 16 guests and provides a high quality level of service.
To get to the Galapagos Islands, we flew via Santiago to Guayaquil in Ecuador, and then onto Santa Cruz at the islands. We spent 2 days on land seeing the sites, including Sea Lions lying around the Wharves, Lava tubes at the Volcano sites and the large Galapagos tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Centre. We then took a fast ferry across to San Cristobal to do 7 days on-board “Deep Blue” diving up to 4 dives per day.
Diving the Galapagos Islands
After boarding the Galapagos Master, we did a check out dive to check our dive skills and weights (the water is very salty there) we then departed from San Cristobal Island on a 7-night itinerary.
Our first dives were off North Seymour Island and was when we saw our first and certainly not our last Hammerhead Sharks. After learning negative entries from the diving tenders on dive two, we visited North Seymour Island and checked out the Blue footed Booby birds and Red Breasted Frigate birds, along with the Iguana before cruising off 100nm to the northern islands of Darwin and Wolf.
If there is only one message you get from this report, it is, if you go to the Galapagos Islands, NEVER MISS DIVING THESE LOCATIONS! The diving at these two locations was outstanding.
We spent two days at Darwin and did up to 8 dives there, all off the famous “Darwin’s Arch”. With our negative entries almost perfected, we entered the water and quickly got to the bottom so the current would not take us away. From here we looked out off the edge of a wall, come drop-off, to see the magnificent site of schooling Hammerheads.
Every dive here was just full of these magnificent sharks and did not get the slightest bit repetitive. Visibility was not outstanding but at around 20 to 25 mtrs on most dives, it was still very nice. Water temp was a lovely 27 -28c too!
Then we moved to the island of Wolf.
Well…if we thought Darwin’s Arch diving was good, diving at Wolf for us topped it off. Dive one for the day
at Wolf had us in Shark Bay, where we saw a few Hammerheads, and the odd Sea-Lion.
Dive two was probably the best dive of the trip. We started at the same location but moved the opposite way around the island to El Derumbe where we struck the Schools of Hammerheads. It wasn’t just 10 or maybe 20 Hammers in the school, it was well over 100! and they just kept coming and coming. The dive-deck was buzzing after that dive!! Dive three was again in the El Derumbe area, but vis had dropped a bit and so had the Hammerheads, so we were truly lucky on dive two.
Our last dive at Wolf ,we chose to dive Shark Bay again, and whilst the dive was nice, we didn’t find our huge schools of Hammerheads again, however, the dive was finished with a big bang, we ended up diving with a large pod of Dolphins. Again a dive we will never forget!
After our last dive, we cruised back to the main archipelago of the Galapagos Islands to the northern end of Isabela at Punta Vicente Roca. It was here we did two dives looking for Sunfish. Dive two at 35 mtrs in the darkness of the morning, we did see two Sunfish, however it wasn’t the greatest chance to see them. We were also buzzed by some sea-lions and saw a small seahorse. Dive three of that day was at Isla Fernandina where we caught up with the Marine Iguana in the shallows.
Every itinerary is scheduled with the Galapagos National Park and must be strictly adhered to regardless of the weather or desire of the divers. The last dive day was at Cousin Rock where we cut the trip short by a dive with a hungry Moray Eel having a bite of a finger and moving us on to Santa Cruz early.
The trip was outstanding. A long way to go from Australia, but worth it!
