Day 162: Life in Gordon’s Rock

Santa Cruz – Gordon Rocks – Santa Cruz – San Cristobal, Ecuador

I was due to arrive at the dive center at 5:25 in the morning. I’m used to the early diving schedules, but this is curiously early. It’s still pitch dark outside. Only later did I find out the reason behind.

Apparently, there are only 7-8 official diving boats in the island. So the boats without proper diving paperwork have to leave before the officials start working later in the morning. Sounds a bit dodgy, but I couldn’t care less.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the other 3 divers were all girls, cool ones at that. Coincidentally, our names are all rather alike: Elys, Elise, Ellie and Ashley. It got a bit confusing for our dive leader, Leon.

Leon pretty much set up all our gear for us prior to our arrivals. So we all took it easy and chatted away during our hour trip to the dive site, Gordon’s Rock.

Now, I have no clue what to be expected in Gordon’s Rock. Michel from Exploramar Diving told me I had to go there. He was right! Holy moly! The amount of marine life in that water! Gordon’s Rock consists of three protruding rocks in the middle of the ocean. Our dive plan was to swim from the biggest rock to the smaller one. But once, in the water, we pretty chased the marine animals around. There’s not a single second when you don’t see something. At one point, we saw 12 hammerheads, 3 manta rays, 2 sea lions, a sea turtle and hundreds and hundreds of fish all at the same time. It’s unreal. It makes diving elsewhere a joke. I couldn’t help but thinking that it must be fun to be a dive leader here with no shortage amount of things to point out to the guest divers. I remember how embarrassing it was for me when I finished some of my dive guiding having only pointed out those tiny nudi branches.

I didn’t know much about hammerhead sharks; if they’re at all dangerous. It was probably a good idea to ask before I decided to chase a school of them underwater. Ellie told me later on that they’re harmless since they have small mouth. As for the manta rays, they looked totally cool underwater; they’re like bomber aircraft meet vampire bats.

I thought I just had the best day of my life here but it got better! The dive package came with not only free breakfast on the boat, but also free lunch in a restaurant. A warm hearty soup and a lobster rice topped off the day. It was my first proper meal since I got to Galapagos (remember my cup noodles and jam bread meal ration that I got from Guayaquil?)

In the afternoon, we took a ferry to another island, San Cristobal. It was raining the rest of the days so I stayed in the hostel watching Doraemon marathon on local TV.