Tuesday 12/06
We wake up at 6:30am. We (Isabelle and I) go and dive today. The kids stay in the hotel, (hopefully) working… They can’t come with us because the dive is a bit difficult (strong current) and required some experience (minimum 30 dives).
We are very much excited. We hope to see hammerhead sharks!
We take the breakfast in the hotel, like yesterday.
We go to the dive centre (in front of the Darwin Centre) on foot. We arrive at 7:30am. We are 7 to go to the famous Gordon Rocks site today.
We go to the port to take the boat. The sea is rather rough. We have one hour of navigation before reaching the site.
We first go in the water (where the water is quite shallow: 5m) so they can test our level.
We go back into the boat and 10’ later we reach Gordon Rocks.
The first dive is great but difficult due to the strong (and unforeseeable) current. We see 5 hammerhead sharks (2 alone and 3 together), as well as a white tip shark and 2 turtles. The underwater case for my phone unfortunately has condensation inside so I can’t take any picture. There are plenty of fishes; I’ve rarely seen such a density of fishes! While surfacing after the dive, we see the fin of a mola mola (also called moonfish or sunfish). We unfortunately don’t go close by; we go back to the boat.
We stay for an hour on the boat, before our second dive.
The visibility is not that great. We stay near the rocks (we went too deep during the first dive: 35m); we don’t go after the hammerhead sharks. We see 2 turtles, moray eel and scorpion fish. We have again strong current.
On the way back to the channel in the north of the island, we eat our lunch (tuna with rice).
We have 40’ drive to the diving centre, by pickup.
We reach the hotel around 3pm. Kids did very well without us. They did 2 homeschooling sessions and they went to town to eat a good lunch in the restaurant where we ate the pizzas the first evening.
Around 5pm, we go to town. We go to the ports (the fishermen one and the passengers one); in both we see pelicans as well as sea lions sleeping on the floor. In the passengers port we also see many baby sharks in the water. We walk a bit in town, trying to find sushis. We find a sushi bar but too expensive (4 USD for one nigiri). We go back to a place near the port where they offer (during the happy hours) 100 sushi (mainly maki of course) for 110 USD. It’s very early (6:15pm) but we are all hungry. The food is nice; it’s good to discover other kind of sushi from time to time (we tend to always stick to our usual salmon nigiri and salmon maki, with avocado…).
We walk back to the hotel, well located. Kids are in bed by 8:30pm.
Isabelle and I work outside, near the swimming pool (there are no mosquitoes, strangely enough). We are surrounded by loud Germans (I know it’s an euphemism). We work until 12:30am (Isabelle tries to book hotels in LA) and I post the first post of the Festival del Señor de Qoyllority.
