The Dirty Dozen Expeditions Galapagos CCR ONLY PHOTO DUMP/BLOG - DARWIN/WOLF ISLANDS.

It is sunrise on Wednesday morning last week. Strong coffee’s are being shared around the breakfast table as we approach the famous Darwin Island after doing a night crossing for 18 hours. We were fortunate conditions were favorable.

Suddenly we hear “WHALE” being shouted from the outside. The team runs out to the bow and sure enough there was a pod of Spermwhales in front of the boat, with Darwin Island and the Pillars Of Evolution in sight. You could not have asked for a better start of the day.

We conduct our diving procedures safety briefing with a lot of location specific procedures. Ripping currents in “the theatre”, an irregular bridge-like submerged plateau around 20m force you to hunker down between rocks to enjoy the show.

The El Niño phenomenon has been at its strongest in over a century and we are curious to see what lies below the surface.

The teams stagger their gearing up for plenty of space on the dive deck and we have rented a 3rd panga so there is no more than 4-5 CCR divers on a panga at any given point, with lots of space for bailouts and cameras.

As the teams exit the mother vessel after conducting a SPLASH checklist and ABC’s before rolling over into the water and descend onto the theatre, I can’t help but to be a little anxious. It feels different and although there are sightings of hammerheads and Galápagos sharks as usual in Darwin this time, they are not coming in large schooling behavior.

There is a huge abundance of wildlife on the reef with hundreds of species everywhere including turtles, eels, morays, jacks, tuna, pipefish and barracudas. The current is very quiet and the water is warmer than usual.

We spend 2 days/8 hours diving Darwin Island with great surface conditions before moving to nearby Wolf Island.

One of the most remote Islands in the Galapagos, Wolf Island is the remaining tip of a massive, mostly subsurface volcano that rises over 1000m above the sea floor. This presents some of the most interesting dive sites in the archipelago.

The dive sites we focused on in Wolf Island were Shark Bay and Landslide. Rip your face/loop cold currents can bring an huge variety of wildlife including Whale Sharks, various species of whales, and Hammerhead, White-tipped, and Galapagos Sharks.

Our first day was slower than expected - so we turned our attention to Elephant rock for our second and final day. Elephant rock is located in the Southwest corner of Wolf Island and can be a very challenging dive which in return could have a great outcome in terms of Marine Life.

The morning dive was a big success, with schools of hammerheads passing in the currents that push through the passage of Elephant and Wolf Island. We surface from the first dive happy and relieved - this is a big reason for coming to Galápagos Islands.

My favorite dive of the trip so far was in the afternoon of that day. The activity on the wall of Elephant Rock was slow in the afternoon and visibility had gotten worse, so when we decided to start heading back from the dive we went down to the seabed to make a “crossing” between Elephant Rock and Wolf Island.

This crossing is not particularly long, but it has blow your loop and mask off currents and extreme care must be taking when crossing to not get ripped away into either downcurrents or “washing machine”. We wanted a final attempt with the hammerheads as it would be likely they would come to this area.

A really vivid and immersive memory for me was being in the middle of this crossing crawling across, hiding behind a large rock counting the divers, and then hearing the screams from the divers… “LOOK UP…. LOOK UP”…… A huge school was right above us fighting the currents themselves, and it was a epic silhouette display of schooling hammerheads.

We managed to anchor ourselves in this area for the remainder of the dive, and had really nice encounters. We surfaced laughing and smiling. This is nature, not a zoo and we rose to the challenge and reaped the rewards. What a dive!

We come back to our expedition vessel, clean our equipment and head towards Isabella and Fernandina Island after two days at Wolf where our hopes were pinned on experiencing first hand the endemic and infamous Ocean Sunfish Mila Alexandrini and Marine Iguana’s.

Stay tuned for the final photo blog in a few days to find out!

WELCOME TO THE REAL JURASSIC PARK!

We have a couple of spots left for our CCR ONLY Trip in 2024 and are expanding our schedule for 2024/2025/2026 with different durations and seasons - TBA at Rebreather Forum 4.0.

Find out more information here: https://cutt.ly/D301QTw and email us on info@thedirtydozen.org to get more information and reserve your spot.

Photo and Video credits:

Aron Arngrímsson

Martin Broen

Marissa Eckert

Jonathan Saenz