Galapagos part 4 - San Cristobal

The San Cristobal airport is 5 minutes out of town. We stayed in a super clean but chotchky-filled Hospedaje Romy. This town was clean, had real roads, nice restaurants and a fun weekend scene. The malecon that goes along the waterfront was full of sea lions and sally light foot crabs. 

San Cristobal has a real homeless problem:

We came to San Cristobal to see the Hammerhead sharks. These are the scuba diving signals for hammerheads:

The next day we had our big tour to Kicker Rock (Leon Dormido) which is a gorgeous rock formation sticking out of the ocean. 

We ended up with Scuba Eden because planet ocean, who we had booked with, had overflow. I scuba dove and the boys snorkeled. The first dive we went down to 64 ft and sat on the rocks and waited. Some large white tips showed up. Our guide Franklin took us up to 35ft  and out to the deep blue. We waited a bit and the hammerhead sharks  eventually showed up. We saw about 8 total. Five of them were circling below us. It was clear and they were pretty close. The biggest was probably 6 ft? I also swam with a sea turtle - hoping my dive buddy can share we GoPro footage. The second dive was remarkably the same in that we went to the same rocks and waited. Franklin took us up a bit and away from the rocks and the sharks showed up. Jeff, the lead diver, said that this is typical 60% of the time. Not a lot of current. Easy diving. Oh and the water was in the mid 70’s. It wasn’t cold and the super thick wetsuit was way overkill. The boys saw the sharks as well especially on the second snorkel. They were 15 ft below the surface at one point and paul dive down until they were just 5 feet away from him. Unfortunately his waterproof camera was dead by that point so our footage was limited to Leo’s GoPro and the divemaster's GoPro both of which caught some sharks far away and not very clearly, so I didn't post them here.

On the boat ride home we saw some manta rays so we chased them a bit and they swam around our boat. They often put one black fin up in the air so they look like a black shark. And they flop about in the water too, splashing. 

The next day began our arduous journey home. We took a plane from San Cristobal to a coastal city in Ecuador and then to Quito where we were from 5:30 pm to 2 am because our flight got delayed. We just barely made it into our connection in Houston and home arriving the next morning and Debbie went straight to work, landing in Denver in time to take conference calls. Sigh.