Marc's Public Blog - Diving

Since we had already been to the Great Barrier Reef (trip 1 and trip 2) as well as Heron Island, as explained on the visiting Lord Howe Island page, thanks to Dirk, we had heard that there was another interesting place to go dive at when in Australia: Lord Howe Island. Since we were going to be flying by Sydney anyway, we thought we'd do a small detour on the way back :)

We didn't quite luck out with diving. The best dive sites were very weather dependent, and we had too much wind every day to go see the better ones in the 7 days we were there. We still got the chance to go diving out of the lagoon eventually, but even that took several days.

The diving we got, was not bad, but it wasn't fantastic either. Temps were 24C, which was borderline cold for a 5mm full suit for me, and vis was from good to decent enough in the sites we were able to go to. Fish life was a bit different from the GBR due to the lower temps.

Thankfully Brian, who runs Howea divers, knew the weather and local conditions very well, and made sure to get us the best diving possible for any given day over better dive sites where conditions would have been too bad to enjoy the site.

The first day, all we could do were 2 very shallow dives off a sheltered beach:

octopus

Linus and Dirk

Ride back from the beach

A funny thing was this little fish that kept trying to scare us off by pretending to attack us. I've had some come straight at my face and look like they were going to head butt me :)

After that, we were able to do boat dives, first in the Lagoon, and then a bit farther where diving was a bit more interesting:

grr!

Eel snake or snake eel?

this snake skinned eels are huge teeth

there were many many fat lobsters :)

I also loved this colorfull fish:

These sea snails were cool

Unfortunately, wind and surf never died down enough for us to be able to dive their better sites. It's hard to say how much better it would have been, but with what we had, I'd say the diving was ok, but somewhat inferior to Heron Island, and definitely inferior to the great barrier reef.
All that said, diving was still decent, and if you are diving in Lord Howe Island, I'll definitely recommend Howea divers over Prodive, which seems to just be a second choice if Howea is booked out.

Little did I know that San Diego actually has colder water than LA and Catalina, and barely warmer than Monterey that is freaking cold (make sure you know where the hole in the ice is, so that you don't get trapped under the ice sheet when coming back up :) ).

Then I had another brilliant idea, if the water is cold, why not sign up for 6 dives in a day. I didn't even know it was possible if you were not on a liveaboard and none of those dives were night dives.

Smallish boat compared to my typical liveaboard, but good enough for a day :)

My 3 morning dives were pretty miserable. Diving in kelp wasn't bad, but 15C was monterey cold and my rental was only a 7mm suit with no vest (in monterey I had a vest for that). Unsurprisingly, I was quite cold, and while I got to see a few things and it's cool to dive amongst kelp, the temps just made it pretty miserable.

look carefully, these were the steps back up to the boat

In the afternoon, they thankfully gave me a 2nd wet suit, so I was now wearing 3mm plus 7mm on top, and the 10mm did the trick. The water was still only 15C, but bearable now.
The first 2 dives were to the yukon, which is indeed a huge ship and impressive to see. We didn't really go inside because I'm not trained for diving inside wrecks, especially because this ship is on its side, so up is not actually up :)
The Ruby was a smaller ship, but because the day ran behind it was a dusk dive turning into a night dive, so I didn't get to see as much. At last I saw the toilet that was there :)

hard to go on the toilet with 2 dive suits

I'll be honest in saying that I'm just not a fan of cold water. Having to wear 7mm with a suit and hood and still being very cold is not fun. The vis was also far from stellar and I'm told was actually pretty standard or even slightly above average. I did learn that I do need at least 10mm or an additional vest to dive in 15C water.
It was actually nice to see the Yukon which is indeed a pretty huge shipwreck, and kelp is interesting to see, but otherwise sea life was pretty minimal compared to the pretty high standards I'm used to.
It wasn't a waste of time, and it was cool to do 6 dives in a day in cold water no less, but I don't really need to be doing this again anytime soon :)

After a couple of days waiting in St Cristobal after being dropped off from land excursions with the Galaven (Thank you again Ecuador for prohibiting anyone from a diving boat from setting foot on land in any interesting place, or even for making sure that it's now impossible to see the highlights on land in less than 2 weeks, and then need a 3 week at least to do diving separately), we finally boarded the Aggressor II for a one week diving trip.

There again, we can thank Ecuador for preventing Aggressor with 2 identical boats, to offset the boats by 3 or 4 days. Instead both boats do the exact same itinerary at the exact same time. How lame... (mostly because it was hard to match land and diving boats, and if aggressor had been able to have one cruise leave every 3 to 4 days, matching would have been easier).
Back to the aggressor, it was a good boat with great staff, good comfort, and great food. The dive sites on the first 2 days were questionable at best, but once more the aggressor was prevented from giving us better dive sites since they were actively prevented by the government from using better sites that would somehow compete with day land boats. Thank you for looking out for us, Ecuador, I do really appreciate it. It's a good way to make sure I don't want to give any more money to other companies there since you're trying to force us to after we've already shelled out a lot of money for 2.5 weeks there and permits.
Also, for the 'greater good' we were also prohibited from doing more than 3 dives per day or actually even more than 16 dives per week (!) compared to a typical 22-25 dives in other locations for the same amount of time.

But I digresss, back to diving. The checkout dive was in a totally uninteresting place that outside of a couple of sea lions that made the dive in a mere 10 meter deep channel with pretty much nothing else to see in it. A few pictures below:
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Day 1: Checkout dive at Isla Lobos

sea lion showing off and swimming upside down

The second day, we started cruising pretty far to Wolf and since the boat wasn't too fast (barely 10kts), and we stopped in Puta Carion (north of Santa Cruz) for 2 dives that weren't stellar, and then Cousin's Rock, just past Bartolome/San Salvador, which was somewhat better.

Day 2: Punta Carion in North Santa Cruz

Day 2: Cousin's Rock

many fish

many fish, really

did I mention many fish?

still had normal sharks there

After being done at Cousin's Rock, we finally motored towards the distant island of Wolf, known for many fish and hammerheads due to its water currents and did our 3 dives there the next day:

Day 3: Wolf

Wolf is a rather rock that doesn't quite fit in my camera. It had a good amount of current, lots of fish, and hammerheads:

this jellyfish had cool pulsating colors

After the 3rd dive, they gave us a Dingy ride to swim with wild dolphins. They were lots of pods and they were easy to find (I counted around 30-40 within view once):

We kind of barely saw a Whale Shark at Wolf, but it was a bit too far for anyone to have gotten a descent picture unfortunately. We were hopeful to see more, but we didn't, we blew our one chance.
Water was around 25C with very strong currents. There were so many baby creole fish that they were actually annoying for litterally blocking visibility, like having a swarm of bees around your head and not being able to see ahead as a result. Because there was so much current, we had to hold on to rocks on 2 out of the 3 dives, and therefore we were inside the pocket of those stupid fish (millions of them, I'm not kidding), and it was hard to see much or get good shots.

After our 3rd dive, we went to the even more distant and smaller island of Darwin:

Day 4: Darwin

Darwin is just a round rock with an arch in front of it, but it has mighty current and lots of sea life (including way too many creole fish).

Darwin also had lots of Hammerhead sharks, but we didn't have the chance to see any whale sharks there. Current was also pretty bad to the point that you just had to find a rock and hold on to it, while you were swatting the small fish away from in front of you and hoping cool stuff would pass by.

too many creole fish, visibility was bad as a result

too many fish still

lots of jacks

a jack and its shadow

many hammerhead sharks

a huge eagle ray hunting for garden eels

The next morning, we did one more dive at Darwin and since current was still quite strong and visibility poor, we elected to go back to Wolf for our last 2 dives of the day:

Day 5: Darwin and Wolf

boobie looking under water to see why I was there :)

Since the current and the vis at Wolf wasn't much better, we did our last dive in the more sheltered area by the boat. No big stuff there, but manageable water and other cool critters instead. It wasn't bad actually. Red lipped batfish was too weird:

Once our 3rd dive was done, we started motoring down to Isabella for 2 more dive sites that actually were quite good and didn't have so many of those damned small fish.

Day 6: Roca Redondo and Punta Vicente Roca by Isabella

Punta Vincente Roca

Roca Redondo was freaking cold for my 5mm suit (21C) and with lots of current, but we got lots of sharks, plenty of other fish and other cool stuff like gas bubbles coming from the earth:

Volcanic bubbles of gas, seeping through the rocks, creepy:

Our last 2 dives were at Punta Vicente Roca by Isabella. It was a bit colder there even (but warm for the season they said), but thanks to a 7mm loaner wetsuit, I did marginally better with temperature.

The last dive was even better since we had a clear shot of a sunfish:

This 'fish' was incredible. It had legs and wings

Can you see me?

Huge sunfish

Dingy ride at Punta Vincente Roca

interesting rock formations made from a mixture of lava and compacted volcanic ash

happy penguin

that crab climbed up and was hanging on a negative slope (half upside down)

Actually, I got to see the flighless cormorant (it had so much food available that it became fat and unable to fly) dive and swim, and it was pretty impressive (almost as good as a penguin), which is not bad considering how bad its wings are.

flightless cormorant has the most sorry ass excuse for wings

bug it sure can swim

Other Misc pictures

Epilogue

The itinerary was as good as they could make it with the hard to accept list of restrictions that are put onto them (and other boats), and generally we were very happy with them.
The diving was good for a few dives, difficult for some others (at least half), and not as good as it would have been with better sites and fewer restrictions for others. Also, it was sad to have so few dives (only 16, including 3 that were very forgettable) considering the time and money expense. I suppose w got lucky to at least see the outline of a whale shark, but it would have been nice to see it better :) Some of the other critters were quite interesting though.
But eh, hopefully I'm wrong, we'll see...

In the end, I don't regret it, but as I made it clear, I'm not super happy with the Ecuador government for all the restrictions that are not linked to preserving the sites (those are understandable) but meant to force visitors to see less and hope that they'll book more tours with more companies as a result. I think they are pissing off the customer and once the word goes around enough, they'll pay the price and regret it dearly in my opinion (Well, they'll be left with the 'bad' cruiseship and land tour tourists, and lose the educated ones looking at seeing more and actually interested in visiting and seeing a lot).

Hopefully it'll turn out better than my current outlook.

We spent our first 8 days in Galapagos on the Galaven which we boarded as soon as we landed in Baltra Island, north of Santa Cruz. Almost every day we had 2 land hikes and two snorkels, some of which were actually almost as good as dives when sea lions come to play with you, or seeing iguanas swim, boobies dive for fish, and more.

As soon as we arrived, we went for our first snorkel and land excursion: the first land excursion on the small island of North Seymour north of Baltra was arguably one of the best ones.

Day 1: Seymour Island

Their Seaguls look pretty

Seymour was a great island for blue footed boobies, and they even did their love dance for us, which apparently not everyone gets to see. We got lucky:

The blue footed boobies were awesome :)

A few cute sea lions

Frigate birds are nasty, but they look funny when the males

babies are fuzzy though :)

Even the doves look cool :)

Many marine iguanas too:

But the more impressives ones were the big fat land iguanasrescued from Baltra Island:

beautiful animals

Day 2: Genovesa Island

On the second day, we went to Genovesa for 2 land hikes. It was also a very good island too:

more blue eyed doves

masked boobies

this juvenile was happy playing with its stick

Two more cool videos from there, boobies preening and a juvenile playing with a stick:

On the rocks, many birds, and owls that were hunting for food:

Found by the water:

For our snorkel, water was crappy, but we saw a few things and a sea lion came to play with us at the end:

bad picture of a hammerhead

During the afternoon, we hiked another portion of Genovesa:

Day 3: San Salvador Lava and Rabida Island

The 3rd morning, we started for a lava hike on San Salvador just across from Bartolome:

The snorkeling there was good:

Here's a video of a marine iguana swimming:

The afternoon, we went to Isla Rabida, nice red sand and beach. It looked a bit like Kawaii in the Hawaii Islands:

After that, we went for a quick Snorkel:

Day 4: Port Ayora/Santa Cruz/Charles Darwin Research Station

They have the famous Lonesome George, the last of its kind:

As well as other tortoises:

The afternoon, we went to El Garrapatero Beach:
The cacti grow really high up there because of drought, all animals try to eat them to get the water out of them, so as a defence, the cacacti grow even higher

baby marine iguanas

Puerto Ayora is a nice little town:

Day 5: North Santa Cruz: Dragon Hill and Bachas

Dragon Hill was a nice little hike:

the cacti have hairy thorns to protect themselves from climbing tortoises trying to suck up the juice from them.

many crabs on each rock

The next land hike was on Bachas, also in North Santa Cruz:

ghost crabs clean the beach sand

We also finally got lucky and saw some flamingos:

The snorkels were also decent:

Day 6: Floreana

playful biting even

We then went to the historical mailbox and lava tube. The mailbox is cool: you put your mail and look at other people's mail and take some of it home and try to get it delivered for them:

There was also a nearby lava tube:

The snorkel from there was great. Sea Lions came to play with us, and we saw several turtles too:

During snorkeling, sea lions came to play with us, and we saw some turtles feeding:

In the afternoon, we went hiking and snorkeling by Sting Ray City:

During snorkeling, we saw scorpionfish:

Day 7: Espanola

they had piles of iguanas

did I mention piles of iguanas?

you're so cute :)

Espanola won on the amount of birds, especially Albatros that can't be found anywhere else:

Those lovely masked boobies kill their brothers to get all the food

friends :)

They also had a blow hole:

The afternoon we went to Gardener Bay:

puppy was happy to see me

The snorkel wasn't bad:

Day 8: San Cristobal

The afternoon, we went to a tortoise habitat:

And that was it for our Galaven trip. After that, we stayed in St Cristobal 2 more days, waiting for our next boat, the Aggressor, to go diving.

Galaven itself was a good enough boat to get around, we had a good itinerary with them (i.e. got to see the better Islands), and the guides were good, so good times were had. We definitely got to see (even under water) many things we wouldn't have seen on a diving boat. It was well worth the trip.

To get to Heron Island, you fly to Gladstone, and either pay a lot for helicopter ride which isn't very useful for saving time since it can only carry 15kg of luggage, which is useless for a diver (the rest goes by boat, so you have to wait for it either way). The cat does go at 30kts, so it flies. It's however very pricey ($240 return per person) and the ride is difficult when the sea is rough (we had stuff flying off tables and people throwing up left and right).

Gladstone has a single runway for the daily quantas turboprops

Qantas Bombardier Dash 8

The high speed cat takes people back and forth to Heron Island

Those who can't deal with the sea, can get a shorter scenic flight

Heron Island

However, I felt that seeing nesting turtles come at night, and baby turtles hatch at night and go to the sea, would be cool (it was). While I don't overly mind being on a boat for a week, it's also nice to be on non moving land and still go diving easily every day :).
My quick review of Heron Island is that the staff was fantastic, the island was fun to walk around, and accomodations were not bad, but it was hot and humid at night without AC and having windows opened meant more noise from the birds :-/ (while basic accomodations are already expensive to start with, there are even more expensive ones with windows and AC). Since we had the more basic accomodations (reef room), I was woken up every night by stupid birds with loud mating calls all night (this was because it was mating season). The upside is that it was also trail of turtle nesting season and the start of baby turtle hatching season.

A few pictures from Heron Island:

an old boat that got beached on the reef

our first reef room wasn't bad, just a bit far from the dive shop, so we moved to a closer one.

yummy :)

we had many good meals :)

The information center was quite good

going out of turtles at sunset, got us a few sunsets :)

Heron Island Birds

those sea birds evolved to trees and make crappy nests out of dry leaves and poo, their efforts were cute :)

Egrets (another name for Herons), which Heron Island comes from

The shearwaters which only come at night, sleep on the ground, and keep everyone awake with loud mating calls

The seagulls were very defensive of their eggs (and see the newboarn baby)

Turtle Nesting

turtle watching: you're doing it wrong

tracks from the nesting turtles

they come after sunset close to high tide

and spend hours to make big holes

Lost Nesting Turtles

trying to get back to the ocean (we helped it)

this one was more stuck

took a few people to get it out :)

and back to the beach

Baby Turtle Hatchling

this is what the eggs look like

aren't those things cute? :)

to the ocean

you can use a flashlight to help the hatchlings to the sea

another nest I found

once the top ones got out, it was a swarm

watch the video to see how fast they go

watch the one on the left that flips over itself :) (light is in front of them so that they go for it)

by then, we found some lost turtles that were lured by the jetty light, we had to hand carry about 30 of them back to the beach where they could go to the water on their own. They weren't big, but they were squirly, it was hard to carry just 3 or 4 at a time since they tried to get out of your hands to fall back on the sand and run in the wrong direction :)

hand rescuing turtles from the jetty lights

yes, it's tempting to take them home :)

Jennifer even managed to rescue one of them from an evil seagull, although we did see 3 more seagulls with hatchlings in their beak that we were not able to save :( (the sad truth is that their survival rate is actually one to one thousand from egg to not having been eaten by fish or sharks in the sea).

Diving

The diving, well, was ok but not great. We did get to see critters that we haven't seen elsewhere (including my 14 days diving the great barrier reef higher north), but there were a few issues:

So, diving was a bit annoying at times with the extra rules and restrictions, and the vis being ok or good less than half the time, wasn't ideal. Yet, we still saw some nice critters as I said above, so it wasn't all for naught, pictures below should show that. Diving came up to about $1000 per person for 16 dives, and BCD/reg rental (on top of the $340/day to stay at Heron Island on a 'special' they were running).

They had several weird sharks and rays we hadn't seen before, like the Wobbegong Shark, or the Shovelnose Ray, not counting some pretty huge (man size) cownose and cowtail rays.

plenty of green turtles

very nice big rays

they were not scared

this one was 'not quite right' :)

lunch was right there :)

not too sure what those were

wobbegon shark

teamwork

We also did some diving by the Jetty and found a few rays and sharks that like to hang out there:

This was the first day, including a wreck dive:

Molokini

Second day:

nice frogfish

wrecked plane

grr...

Third day:

Molokini Birds

Molokini Birds

amphibious vehicle

we finally found an octopus

once it's found, it sticks to you for protection from other predators

Thankfully one of the passengers was able to get a copy, finally.

Here are a few highlights: