November 5, 2002, 10:18 pm 30.45" Hg, 73.0 F

This morning required a very early wake-up, as at about 7:45 there was an announcement that divers should be ready to depart in ten minutes. I had forgotten when we were to leave. I leapt out of bed, quickly got dressed, assembled everything in my knapsack, and trotted over to reception to depart. Seeing no one there, I ran up to the dining area for a quick breakfast snack. Then the three of us (Jeff, Marla, and myself) were ferried over to the quay at Puerto Ayora on the wouthwest edge of the island of Santa Cruz.


Puerto Ayora, a town of 20,000

There the divemaster from yesterday, Luis, met us, and we were driven along with Cassia, a woman from Sao Paolo, Brazil, along for the diving, across the island to the channel between Santa Cruz and Baltra. We loaded up the dive boad (they loaded - we watched) at a ferry disemberkation location. We steamed twenty minutes to Daphne Minor, a volcanic mount off the north shore of Santa Cruz.

Daphne Minor
Jeff and our divemaster Luis

This dive was a wall dive, as the volcanic mount rises from a bottom over 100 feet below. It was a great dive; we saw a ten inch seahorse, two grey and one brown moray eels, some bumphead parrotfish, and many colorful nudebranches. Cassia, along the way, gave some pointers on breathing more slowly to increase bottom time. She walks, cycles, and practices yoga in Brazil to improve here diving.

When I started to run low on air, the divemaster, Luis, gave me his octopus regulator to breath on. Although I gained an extra five minutes, I missed the large octopus that Luis and Cassia saw just after I left them to go up for a safety stop at fifteen feet!

We then had cookies and crackers on the boat, as we had na hour surface time before our next dive. The next one was on North Seymour, just below some rocky cliffs.


The cliffs of North Seymour

I lasted fifty minutes for this dive - a happy improvement. We found a sleeping sea turtle in a crevice, a tiger snake eeel, a black spotted moray and many sharks. Many sharks! At first we saw four white tipped reef sharks in a small cave, a few of which darted out. A bit further on we saw five more and we settled to the bottom, gripping some coral to avoid flopping about in the stroing surge, and watched them circle about feeding. We spent over fice minutes watching these sharks, like a Jaques Cousteau special, circling about feeding. They swam with their mouths open and occasionally snapped their jaws shut. After return to the boat we forwent our Polaris box lunches for some good rice, mashed yuca, and cold chicken in a cream sauce. It was very good. What was special was that the sun broke out as we were returning to the boat - the balance of the day featured a greay sky.

After piling into "My Friend", the pickup truck which had brought us over, we chatted as we drove south until we turned off on a dirt side road whose condition was reminiscent of wilderness area fire roads in California. We drove down this for half a mile until we were stopped by a blue and white bus in front of us. This bus blocking our progress turned out to full of Polaris passengers, including Marla's mother and Jeff's wife, so we joined them and the naturalist Fernanda, and walked down a trail into some green fields. We wore boots and windbreakers for it was grey and damp. Here and there in the grass were to been grayish lumps, like boulders. However, a closer approach revealed to one that these boulders had legs. We were seeing dozens of Galapagos tortoises in the wild.



Self propelled boulders, AKA Santa Cruz land tortoises

This sub-specias was the Santa Cruz variety. Fernanda explained that the fields were of a farmer, and I spotted a cow pattie. Fernanda said that the cows and tortoises could co-exist peacably. Although the barbed wire fences delimiting these fields may have corralled the cows, from the scratches on the tortoises' shells I presume the tortoises were not so similarly constrained.

After this, the three of us, Cassia, and our divemaster Luis were dropped at the Charles Darwin Research station, which has an exhibit about the giant Galapagos tortoise and conducts tortoise breeding programs, releasing young into the wild when thy are large/old enough to resist preadtors (other than hungry pirates). Then the three of us walked through town (Puerto Ayora) souvenir shopping along the way.


Jeff, Marla, and myself in Puerto Ayora
I bought my obligatory postcards and a coffee mug with an iguana to add to my collection at work which illustrates all the places I've been. An uneventful zodiac ride back to the Polaris, dinner, and an Ecuadorean band played Andean music which sounded very much like the music of Panchamam, show cassette I bought in Strasbourg in the summer of 1986. During the zodiac ride I learned why they call the zodiac "panga". Years ago small boats were made in Ecuador from a hollowed felled tree. Thus all small boats (not just zodiacs) came to be called pangas. In town Jeff wanted a small wood carved iguana, so the three of us went in every shop a searching...

November 6, 2002 9:28 pm