DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA ISSUE 413 AUGUST 25

A large male seal was incredulous that us divers were interrupting his bait ball, and sat at the entrance to a crevasse on Isabella Island wondering what he was to do. Eventually he took off over the top of us and caused panic amongst the thousands of fish he had to choose breakfast from.

After three days diving Darwin and Wolf we headed south to Fernandina Island for a dive with the marine iguanas. They proved a bit elusive. I had one brief sighting on entering the water, then nothing until the last two minutes of the dive where I managed to get a couple of photos. Beforehand we dived a different site for Galapagos bullshead sharks, (a type of Port Jackson shark), and searched in vain for the red lipped batfish. Perhaps the best dive of the trip was at Isabella Island. Here we did our deepest dive of the trip at 26m (most of the dives were at 20-23m, with some being shallower) and had been warned that the visibility on this site could be anything from murky to crystal clear. We had something between the two, and the main reason for diving

here was there in numbers. This was the site to see sunfish, also known as mola-mola. Dropping down from where we entered the water, we found two large specimens at the 26m mark straight away. They were being cleaned by the King angelfish, and we were able to get quite close and observe them without disturbing them. Following the wall to the left we passed through a crack in the rock which had ten’s of thousands of schooling fish using the dark passage to hide from the seals, which would speed past us in the enclosed space, spooking the schooling fish into a frenzy. More mola-mola awaited us past the crevasse, heading slowly towards the cleaning station and staying just away from the wall. This is a magnificent dive site that I would like to dive again and again. Cousin’s Rock is a divesite that must be dived several times too. Unfortunately on this one my camera malfunctioned, so I spent the dive carting around a heavy weight for no reason, missing the chance to get closeup photos of mobula, eagle rays, white-tipped reef sharks by the dozen, and one of the biggest mantas I have seen. There were shore excursions too, with a trip onto North Seymour Island to see the bird life there, and later onto Santa Cruz for the tortoises. The wildlife on these islands are not scared of people, they have never been

I had never realized that frigate birds would fly with their red air-sac inflated.

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DiveLogAustralasia #413 August’25

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