oceancat
Contributor
Hi all! Since I bugged everyone for months with questions, I wanted to share the experiences of our recent trip to Ecuador. We were there June 26-July 11th. For our Ecuador adventures, I used Andean Discoveries, run by Damin Corkin, who lives in Quito. Damon was fantastic (we had a group of 6 and I didn't want to deal with logistics in Ecuador)--we had no transportation issues at all and he runs a beautiful B&B in Quito for his guests--it was like staying at the Ritz. We spent the 1st 4 days of our trip in the rainforest at Napo Wildlife Center and I can't say enough about the diversity of species we saw. It was just amazing. The jungle was a little cooler (mid-70's for the most part) and less buggy than we expected. NWC was in an amazing location--2 hrs down the Napo river in a motorized canoe and then almost 2 hrs up a small river (and the wildlife sighted--monkeys, lots of birds, caiman, even a sloth-awesome!) to a lagoon where the lodges were perched. Our guide was fantastic--knew a lof of ecology and all the scientific names (we were a group of 5 scientists and an engineer--people could not get over how geeky our conversations became!). After that, we spent 3 days in the highlands at Hacienda El Porvenir. The food there was excellent, but the place is a bit rustic in that the rooms don't have central heat--not an issue if the woodstove works in the room, but it was not working for one pair in our group and they got smoked out and had no heat for 2 nights (when the temps dip into the 30's, this is an issue. We did have a very fun horseback ride as well as a challenging trip up to the glacier of Cotopaxi.
After all of that, we joined others for a week on the Aggressor I July 3-10th. The first day they seemed amazingly disorganized and I was quite worried. This was my first live aboard experience, so I have nothing to compare it to. Our check out dive consisted of us randomly jumping in the fairly crowded harbor in San Cristobal (we hadn't motored anywhere) with no aggressor crew. surprisingly, I saw a number of species of fish there I didn't see anywhere else of the trip (huge school of pelican barracuda as well as lot of pipefish). After the first day, they seemed to get into a groove and the diving and operations went much smoother. All of the crew were excellent except for the second dive master who was also supposed to be our natralist guide. The guy, Romero, obviously didn't have much interest in being there and also didn't speak much english. My husband is fluent in spanish and he could barely get a word out of the guy and when he was asked more detail about the land critters we were seeing, he didn't have a clue. I would have expected a much better naturalist guide on an Aggressor than what we had. Tourist class boats in the Galapagos have better guides than this guy. He also ditched our group at the final dinner on land, when he was supposed to be with us. Our head DM, Nelson, was quite good and dealt will all sorts of issues that came up--we had some signifant sea sickness cases on the boat and one of the divers fell getting on the panga and actually tore his quad (he could barely walk and couldn't dive the latter part of the trip-the 3 veterinarians in our group were quite the ship's doctors--the caveat was everyone got treatment as if they were horses). The crew actually got him a pair of crutches for our Santa Cruz excursion. The front cabins had all sorts of pump issues with the toilet since the boat was bouncing around so much, the Aggressor II caught on fire (thankfully no harmful damage--they continued on) and our GPS was apparently messed up (including the diver finding equipment--but no one wandered away). They were fixing that when we got to Santa Cruz.
Now for the diving--amazing! I couldn't believe the diversity of species (even the little blennies few mention)--lots of eels, rays: eagle rays, mobula rays, diamond stingrays, 2 manta rays, marble rays, sharks--silky sharks (including one we could have touched during a safety stop he was so close), galapagos sharks, white tipped, supposed bull sharks (Nelson thought) and of course the schooling hammerheads, which were incredible. We only had 1 dive out of 11 at wolf/darwin where we didn't see the schooling hammerheads. We had sea lions following us around at Cousin's Rock eating striped salema in this giant wall of fish we were swimming through. Saw sea horses, more green sea turtles (over 20 on some dives) than I every would have hoped at Wolf. Also saw dolphins on 3 dives. Our conditions were abysmal for seeing Whalesharks--the water at Wolf and Darwin was WARM--81F and there was little to no current. One of our panga groups saw a pod or orcas at Wolf. We had given up hope. However, on our 6th and last dive at Darwin, 25 minutes into the dive, there he came--a giant mack truck out of the blue! This guy we estimate was 35-40 feet long. He was huge--our group of divers was dwarfed by him. We swam with him for about 4 minutes and it was just magical. He was just beautiful. Amazing. The air/water temps are starting to cool in the galapagos--land tours were in the 70's and 80's. Water temps at the southern islands (Cousins, Gordons) were 71-73. Again, we had odd conditions with litte current anywhere-not even at Gordon's. I had a fleece that was worn constantly.
Let me know if you have any other questions. The Aggressor was great--we were really happy with the trip and found all of our adventures in Ecuador to be fantastic.
After all of that, we joined others for a week on the Aggressor I July 3-10th. The first day they seemed amazingly disorganized and I was quite worried. This was my first live aboard experience, so I have nothing to compare it to. Our check out dive consisted of us randomly jumping in the fairly crowded harbor in San Cristobal (we hadn't motored anywhere) with no aggressor crew. surprisingly, I saw a number of species of fish there I didn't see anywhere else of the trip (huge school of pelican barracuda as well as lot of pipefish). After the first day, they seemed to get into a groove and the diving and operations went much smoother. All of the crew were excellent except for the second dive master who was also supposed to be our natralist guide. The guy, Romero, obviously didn't have much interest in being there and also didn't speak much english. My husband is fluent in spanish and he could barely get a word out of the guy and when he was asked more detail about the land critters we were seeing, he didn't have a clue. I would have expected a much better naturalist guide on an Aggressor than what we had. Tourist class boats in the Galapagos have better guides than this guy. He also ditched our group at the final dinner on land, when he was supposed to be with us. Our head DM, Nelson, was quite good and dealt will all sorts of issues that came up--we had some signifant sea sickness cases on the boat and one of the divers fell getting on the panga and actually tore his quad (he could barely walk and couldn't dive the latter part of the trip-the 3 veterinarians in our group were quite the ship's doctors--the caveat was everyone got treatment as if they were horses). The crew actually got him a pair of crutches for our Santa Cruz excursion. The front cabins had all sorts of pump issues with the toilet since the boat was bouncing around so much, the Aggressor II caught on fire (thankfully no harmful damage--they continued on) and our GPS was apparently messed up (including the diver finding equipment--but no one wandered away). They were fixing that when we got to Santa Cruz.
Now for the diving--amazing! I couldn't believe the diversity of species (even the little blennies few mention)--lots of eels, rays: eagle rays, mobula rays, diamond stingrays, 2 manta rays, marble rays, sharks--silky sharks (including one we could have touched during a safety stop he was so close), galapagos sharks, white tipped, supposed bull sharks (Nelson thought) and of course the schooling hammerheads, which were incredible. We only had 1 dive out of 11 at wolf/darwin where we didn't see the schooling hammerheads. We had sea lions following us around at Cousin's Rock eating striped salema in this giant wall of fish we were swimming through. Saw sea horses, more green sea turtles (over 20 on some dives) than I every would have hoped at Wolf. Also saw dolphins on 3 dives. Our conditions were abysmal for seeing Whalesharks--the water at Wolf and Darwin was WARM--81F and there was little to no current. One of our panga groups saw a pod or orcas at Wolf. We had given up hope. However, on our 6th and last dive at Darwin, 25 minutes into the dive, there he came--a giant mack truck out of the blue! This guy we estimate was 35-40 feet long. He was huge--our group of divers was dwarfed by him. We swam with him for about 4 minutes and it was just magical. He was just beautiful. Amazing. The air/water temps are starting to cool in the galapagos--land tours were in the 70's and 80's. Water temps at the southern islands (Cousins, Gordons) were 71-73. Again, we had odd conditions with litte current anywhere-not even at Gordon's. I had a fleece that was worn constantly.
Let me know if you have any other questions. The Aggressor was great--we were really happy with the trip and found all of our adventures in Ecuador to be fantastic.
