Diving at the End of the Earth

We woke up at 6:30am and headed down for breakfast. Rick was feeling much better, the sparkle was back in his eye, Yay! We took the pangas out to Darwin's Arch and dropped in to the water. Almost immediately we saw hammerheads all over the place. We dropped down and hung on to some rocks in the current and watched as dozens and dozens of hammerheads swam by. It was really awesome!

We did 3 more dives over the course of the day, each one chock full of hammerheads as well as giant schools of many types of smaller fish. We must have seen 400-500 hammerheads over the course of the day. Fantastic!

When we woke up it was Randy's turn for not feeling so well, though his was no where near as severe as Rick or Tim. We decided to sit out the first dive, but jumped in for the second as Randy was feeling better. It's a good thing we did, because that's the dive where we got our one and only whale shark sighting! It was about 40 feet long and we could just see it's silhouette. We all swam as hard as we could to get closer, but it easily outran us. We were very excited to have seen one. The crew decided to stay at Darwin for the last dive of the day rather than return to Wolf, on the chance we'd see another whale shark. Turns out we didn't, but we saw lots of other types of sharks while we waited. At the end of the dive we drifted into a sandy area where there were dozens of sharks just beyond the visibility. One Galapagos shark found us quite interesting and circled around us for a few minutes, never getting too close.

Back on board we started the 18 hour sail back to the central islands, had dinner, and then headed up to bed.