Global Teen Adventures

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1-27-20 - Swimming with sharks!

 

Today is scuba diving day in the Galápagos Islands.  We are picked up at 6:30 am and driven to the port to meet our dive boat team. Today, Ashley and Leanne will snorkel while the rest of the group will do two dives. The first is in North Seymour which is situated off the northern coast of Santa Cruz Island about 30 minutes from the Itabaca Channel. The second dive is at Mosquera which is situated off the northern coast of Baltra Island.

The boat is nice but fairly crowded.  Besides the crew and our seven, there are five other certified divers and four discovery divers who are not certified but are trying scuba diving out. The lead scuba instructor asks us to go around say where were form and how many dives we’ve done.  The certified divers include two from the UK, one from San Francisco and one from the states but he has lived all over Latin America and has settled down and been living in mainland Ecuador. One of the UK guys has over 40 dives and his friend just recently got certified for this trip and this is his first post certification dive.  He looks a little scared and says, “I’m just doing this because my buddy is making me.”

The lead instructor takes us through the dive briefing and reviews hand signals.  We can tell this guy is pretty hard, core and Leanne is glad she’s not diving as that guy could be Australia guy all over again.  He tells us that he will take the four certified divers and Juan Carlos will take the five of us.  Juan Carlos comes over humorously wearing a Nemo diving hood.  We are immediately relieved as this instructor is clearing not taking himself seriously.

As we approach our first dive stop, we see an uninhabited island with a bare stretch of sand flanked by black volcanic boulders. Kyle looks and gets totally animated and excited and starts shouting, “Los penguinos! Los penguinos! Los penguinos!” Kyle has apparently fallen in love with Penguins in Antarctica. 

Leanne starts cracking up as Kyle’s “penguins” are various shades of neon pink, effervescent blue and Florida Gators orange.  In fact one might even be in official UF merchandise. Ashley puts her hand on his shoulder and gently breaks the news, “Dad, those are humans.” Yes, clearly Leanne and Ashley have way better vision than Kyle or perhaps Kyle desperately wanted to see more penguins because we only saw 17,326 of them in Antarctica. All this traveling is making us giddy now. 

We stop and the divers enter the water first. The divers see schools of more than thousand tropical fish, enough different colored starfishes to resemble the American flag, spotted Eagle rays, sea eels among others.  But the biggest thrill is the sharks! First, we see a white tip reef shark swimming about 10 meters away.  Awesome. This is followed by black-tip reef sharks and Galapagos sharks. Sharks are everywhere.  Some are resting on the bottom and Kyle swims right up next them only about 1 meter away.  Justin is thrilled that the kids saw the ever-dangerous hammerhead shark which Kyle somehow missed. 

Back on the boat, Kyle declares it better diving than they experienced in the Great Barrier Reef and Thailand.  And when you get to dive with an instructor who is willing to wear a Nemo cap in the vicinity of any type of shark, you must give extra points for him and the location.  True to form Juan Carlos is very laid back about everything.   We hang out on the front of boat as the boat approaches the second dive site.   

The second dive provides many of the same marine life we saw but additional ones as well.  We see a sea turtle which Juan Carlos somehow missed.  He is pointing at a fish to the left and we take off to the right to get a closer look at the sea turtle. There are just as many sharks but now Kyle has taken to chasing the sharks when they swim off instead of merely posing for pictures with them. They see another hammerhead shark and Kyle sees it this time. Seriously, someone needs to make Kyle understand that sharks chase humans not the other way around before he ends up as one of the shark’s dinner. 

The boat returns and they take us to lunch where we chat with the other divers.  One of the guys from the UK was an accountant who hated his job so he quit and is traveling solo.  Kyle asks him how long he is traveling and he says, “no less than six months but I’ll travel for as long as I can until I either get bored or run out of money.” Love that attitude. 

The American who married an Ecuadorian and lives with her in the town of Manta tells us that he rents a house on the ocean with a huge pool and where he can hear the whales breach from his balcony for US $900 a month. 

The guy from San Francisco is a software engineer from Silicon Valley who is here solo for vacation and will return to his job in the states after Galapagos.  He looks a little forlorn after hearing us talk about our trip, the UK traveler and the Ecuadorian mansion.  

After the lunch, Leanne turns bright red from too much time in the Equatorial sun and is now in some intense pain. She is threatening to burst into flames so Kyle lines up a few bottled waters next to her just in case.

 Leanne has a Minds Matter board meeting conference call with folks back home, John has a college course quiz and a singing lesson tonight and we have a few other to dos to do.   It’s not all fun and games, but there is no shortage of them either. 

 We head into town and eat dinner at an open air restaurant which we ate at last night.  It was such a hit that we return tonight.  There is a pre-historic looking moth, dragonfly, tetradactyl looking creature the size of our hand flying around and dive bombing our table.  Although the kids aren’t thrilled about the uninvited guest joining our fun, the food is just too good to abandon. We finish up and call it a night.