Galapagos: Mola Mola and swimming with iguanas
Swimming with Iguanas
We had a complete night of sailing to the west of Galapagos during the night, bit I was so tired that I slept almost 10 hours in one go. ( We went to bed at 8pm)
There were Sea lions playing out the windows when we were having breakfast, jumping out of the water like dolphins. The sea is super calm and it's sunny outside. The same sealions were still playing at the back of the boat as we were getting geared up. We also saw a few mola mola at the surface. We were getting really excited about today's dive!
This first dive is excellent and didn't disappoint. We saw a lot of types of fish for the first time !
Here is what we got: Mola mola, smooth face sharks, Mexican bullhead shark, red lip batfish, sealion playing with us. Shrimps. Arlequin wrasse, blue nudi. Flounders

The second dive is swimming with the iguanas !
The conditions were perfect, a very flat and quiet sea and a lot of sun, the guides told us that there were a lot more iguanas in the water than usual. They dive and stay almost 5min stationary grazing on the green algae. Because they don't see that well underwater, if you are slow and don't blow too much bubbles you can get really close. It's a shallow dive no more than 5m. We also got to see a flighless cormorant hunting under water too ! That was exceptional.


We sail 2 more hours to our diving spot for the afternoon Which is supposed to be perfect to spot mola mola cleaning stations. Unfortunately on the third dive the temperature dipped further and the visibility was horrible, we hardly could see each other. In the end, we probably saw only a sea lion playing with us and Arlequin wrasses. But we were very disappointed on our way up and cold to the bone. It's frustrating because you could this location to be an awesome dive spot, there were soft corals a couple nudis. Like you can feel this has the potential for awesomeness.


The fourth dive was on the same spot and only 3 courageous ( Alexis being one of them ) decided to do it. They reported the visibility and temperature to be as bad and what made their dive great was that the sea lion were out to play and stayed really close to them for half of their dive. They were supposed to look for seahorses, they didn't find them.
For the group that stayed on board, we had time to chill ( and warm up in the boat hot tub) and then the cruise director offered to bring us on the dingy along the shoreline to see what life was around. It was a great idea, we cruised along and spotted a lot of iguanas on the rocks, a multitude of colorful crabs, blue feet dobby, and flightless cormorans dancing on the surface. A penguin was hunting and we got the same sealions as the divers jumping like dolphins around the boat. That was excellent! We ended this little trip by checking out one of the wrecks along the shore.


As I am writing this, i am on the sundeck and was just gazing out and saw a manta ray jump twice out of the water ! insane !
The Galapagos are so full of life, it's astonishing! It's an amazing place, I am so glad we came here.