[Jules]

Trip report part 3

Out at Wolf and Darwin you can get complacent about the sheer volume of sharks you see and it’s possible to think that people are exaggerating. Believe me, they aren’t



By the way these video clips are fairly low resolution as taken on my faithful Olympus 5050 camera. They do however give some impression of what we saw.

In the five days we had so many superb shark encounters, it’s hard to do it justice in a short report.

We had a long and very choppy journey back from our last dives at wolf to get to Cousins rock for the next day . A lot of people felt unwell and whilst I wasn’t sea sick I did find the long journey very tiring and I put my camera together whilst tired and not really with it. The next morning we were woken at 6 to dive at 6:20 at cousins rock. I wasn’t really with it at all. Forgot a few things and was generally what I would refer to as clusterf***. 3 minutes into the dive my camera stopped working as the housing gradually filled with water.
Doing something stupid and drowning your camera is annoying, doing it twice in the same mode of failure is just plain daft so the fact that I had again trapped the little string across the o ring is still irritating me now. Oh how they laughed at me when I said I was bringing 4 cameras. How many did I end up using? All four!

The first dive at Cousins rock then was a bit of a mooch in poorish viz. We were looking for sea horses and didn’t find any. We saw a very amusing sight of a group of divers arm in arm finning very quickly along. I can only think it was people doing a try dive as their behaviour was most bizarre.!

Second dive we did see sea horses and Luis showed me a frog fish. The first one he has spotted in about 5 years here.

After showers and lunch we had a land visit to Santiago looking at the lava formations was fascinating. We also saw Marine Iguanas and lava lizards.


Marine iguana


Lava lizard


Super with Curley Wurley


Jason looking like an elf

The lava formations were just odd



After the land visit we went for a short Panga ride to try to see some penguins



This might have been the first day that any of us managed to stay up past the 9pm watershed. Right at the beginning Gary I think it was tried to instigate a rule that you had to stay up past nine but many of those that did were caught resting with their eyes shut . It was just so tiring getting up at 6 and doing all that diving.

To be continued…