Arriving in Galápagos

From Quito, you fly to Baltra, the main airport of the Galápagos on a small island off of Santa Cruz. As soon as you leave the plane, you must check in through the Galápagos National Park. Here you pay your $100 US entry fee (crisp, clean bills please), and go through another inspection for foreign species, only this time is for your carryon bags. We were very impressed with the parks dedication and efforts to keep out non-endemic species. After check in, you board a bus that takes you to the docks.

This is where you begin your stay on your boat. Our vessel, the Reina Silvia (RS), was a 90-foot long craft, with a main dining and sitting lounge, and then several cabins below deck. On the upper deck were the bridge, the owner's suite (which we reserved for an extra fee), and a deck for all of your dive gear and wet suits to hang. There were also 3 "dinghies" (inflatables) used for transporting divers to the dive sites. We were very glad we reserved the owner's suite on this boat as the normal cabins were a bit cramped. They were very cramped for people over 6 feet tall, the beds tended to be short. The owner's suite however, was very accommodating, with a king size bed, and plenty of storage cabinets and table space for cameras. Well worth the extra money.

The dive deck, though upstairs, was very spacious for everyone's gear. You left your BC's on your tank all week long, and it was loaded on and off the dinghy for you when your regulators were attached. You indicated that you were going on the next dive by bringing your reg's down and attaching them to your tank. Everything else was kept upstairs in plastic crates, wetsuits hung along bars on the top deck. There were no designated "camera tables" per say, but you were welcomed to use the extra booths in the dining area or the sitting lounge up front. As we mentioned, this is where the suite was beneficial. Anyone with A LOT of camera gear would be pressed for space to put it in the lower cabins. Two large garbage can size pails were used for camera rinse tanks on the lower deck, and there were also 3-4 freshwater hoses for rinsing regs, cameras, and your other equipment. Overall, the RS had a nice operation and layout for accomodating divers.

The RS immediately departed for North Seymour Island for our checkout dive, serving lunch along the way, no guinea pig. Lunch was of course, fish! If you like seafood, you will get plenty of it throughout the week, and the crew of the RS tried to be accommodating to special diet requests. The crew did speak some english, and eventually you reached some type of a compromise on translations.

This checkout dive probably has more importance than checkouts at other destinations. The key was evaluating how much weight you needed to establish neutral to slightly negative buoyancy. Since this was colder water, there may be people without experience in weighting thicker wetsuits, combined with hood and gloves. There does tend to be a higher density of salt water in this region due to the inflow of currents, further increasing your buoyancy. We were instructed to error on being negatively buoyant, as they did want you to be able to hug the bottom. All of this contributes to needing more weight than you are probably used to. Just for example, someone who might usually use 8 lbs for a 2 mm suit in the Caribbean could use up to 20 lbs or more with a 5 mm suit in Galápagos.

Leaving the cameras behind, the checkout dive gave us a chance to test all of our dive gear out, establish our weights, and gave us a hint of what is in store for us. You put on your gear while in the dinghy in route to the site, and do a backward roll entry. We immediately saw 3-4 VERY LARGE stingrays, surpassing the size of any stingray we have ever seen in the Caribbean, as well as a grouping of 6 white tip reef sharks. Visibility was probably around 50 feet. The dive time was limited to 30 minutes so we could get back on board and have time for a land tour in the afternoon.