Galapagos: Diving Gordon Rocks

Second Day of diving.  Today is Gordon Rocks, a bit farther away than the diving site yesterday.  I was the only passenger for Nautidiving, so they sent me to a different company which in turn sent me to a third one (I didn’t have to do anything, it was just a change of meeting place).  This company wasn’t as good as Nautidiving, offering a very simple lunch.  However, their dive masters (we had two) were very good.  Given the distance to get there (1 hour on a speed boat each way), we only did 2 dives plus the buoyancy check.  The ride was also very bumpy with one person getting very seasick.  My companions were one person from the US (Laura) and three Israelis.  As I did my buoyancy check the previous day, I just did snorkeling at the check site.  No jelly fish this time.

Here are the stats for the dive:

Dive	Max Depth	Avg Depth	Bottom Time
1	94ft	61ft	38mins
2	70ft	42ft	42mins

Gordon Rocks was a more advanced site with deeper dives and very strong currents.   The diving place is basically an eroded crater with the bottom of the crater, surrounded by two broken semi-circular walls.  The inside of the crater goes down to 95ft while the outside wall goes to a depth of more than 450ft.

The highlights of the dives were the encounter with a huge sunfish and a school of hammerhead sharks.  There were also some coral (unusual in Galapagos) on the inside walls plus turtles and lots of fish inside the crater.

	Beautiful coral
	Sunfish
	Laura
	Green Turtle

	Hammerhead Shark
	School of fish and diver
	Streamer Hogfish
	Turtle and Laura
	Two different kind of star fish

After the dive, I decided to have an extra day of diving the following day.  Originally I was scheduled for a tour of the highlands as the package assumes that you fly after the diving program, but given that I wasn’t doing that, diving was a possibility.  After scoring a place on a boat to Floreana, I went for dinner with the Israelis and Laura.