Galapagos Diving

If you go to the Galapagos Islands you have to scuba dive. Well, you at least have to snorkel, but dive if you can.

We were able to dive with hammerhead sharks while in the Galapagos. It was so much fun. Even though I'm thrilled about seeing hammerheads, even better was swimming with the sea lions. On shore or in the shallow waters they are very fiesty, but underwater they are playful and elegant. You can play with them like you would a puppy. One sea lion kept following us around and would mimic us doing flips underwater. 

 Unfortunately our underwater cameras were acting up a few of the days and we couldn't capture some of the amazing things we saw underwater. We did however take some of these photos with a disposable underwater camera.

  

One of the days we swam up and around the little penguins. 

I am usually not a big fan of snorkling, but I had two of the best and most fun snorkels of my life in the Galapagos. The first we were able to snorkle above a huge pack of rays swimming in circles underneath us forever. Some of the rays were huge and were atleast five feet wide. If you were decent at freediving you could dive down and swim through and underneath them. At one point I was able to dive underneath about 15 of them and look up to them slowly floating along. Even deeper beneath the ray's you could see about fifty  2-4 foot sharks.

The other amazing snorkel I experienced was following my boat captain as he took me through tunnels and caves full of sharks. He didn't speak english, but he would wave me over and mimic to hold my breath. We would swim through tunnels to a handful of sharks waiting on the other side. They were usually about four feet long. The tunnels were fun enough to just swim through, and then to have little sharks waiting for me was absolutely amazing. A few of the times he swam into a cave where the only way out for the sharks was to swim back towards us skimming me on their way out. Luckily my captain was 100% confident in what he was doing otherwise I would have never gone into the caves on my own. 

Galapagos Islands definitly win for the best diving I have ever had. The only downfall is the water is extremely cold.