8 Pacific dive legends

GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS, ECUADOR

Ask a diver only who’s only casually aware of the Galápagos Islands and you’re apt to hear that they were discovered by Charles Darwin, that they are totally uninhabited, and that the diving involves only cold-water, large-mammal encounters.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The Galápagos, lying 600 miles west of mainland Ecuador, were actually discovered in 1535 by the navigationally challenged Tomas de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, when he wound up spectacularly off-course during a sea voyage to Peru. He wrote to the king of Spain about the giant tortoises (galapagas) that lived there and, just like that, these equatorial islands had a name. Today, roughly 17,000 people live in towns on the islands of San Cristóbal, Isabela, Floreana and Santa Cruz.

Water temperatures run from 60ºF on sites around Fernandina and to the west of the large island of Isabela (where the Cromwell and Humboldt currents bring cold, nutrient-rich upwellings), and they can be as high as 85ºF on dives off Wolf and Darwin islands, up near the equator.

It’s possible to make land-based dives from hotels in Puerto Ayora, the Galápagos’ largest town, on the island of Santa Cruz. But the vast majority of Galápagos divers use live-aboards, which make much more effective use of time by moving from area to area while divers sleep.

Two of the more far-flung islands of the Galápagos, Wolf and Darwin, are known the world over as a place to see schooling hammerhead sharks, and Wolf is often visited because of its cleaning station, where king angelfish rise to pick parasites from the huge sharks. Parrotfish, Moorish idols, rainbow runners, jacks of all sorts, green morays, spotted eagle rays and many other warm-water species live here, as do green and hawksbill turtles, dolphins, tiger sharks and marlin.

Elsewhere in the Galápagos, divers may find themselves swimming with dizzyingly fast, bubble-streaming Galápagos penguins (the second-smallest species of penguin in the world, and the only one found near the equator), fur seals, sea lions, whitetip reef sharks, stingrays and a variety of fish brought by the mixing of cold- and warm-water currents.

The western islands — all of Fernandina, the west coast of Isabela and Isabela’s satellite island, Roca Redonda — have water temperatures cooler than those found anywhere else in the Galápagos; due to that fact, they’re are home to marine life not found elsewhere. This is the place to see Galápagos horned sharks, goldrim surgeonfish, chevron barracuda, sailfin grouper, zebra morays and a variety of other species, some found nowhere else in the world.

SANTA CATALINA ISLAND

It’s an island built largely with chewing gum, a place where the buffalo roam (only because they were once imported for the filming of a western), where there’s a casino but gambling is not allowed, and where, although the light of sunset often glints back from the windows of distant, freeway-dense Los Angeles, the principal form of transportation is the electric golf cart.

In 1919, William Wrigley, owner of the Wrigley Company (the folks who brought you Juicy Fruit), recognized that much of Santa Catalina Island was in a natural state that had deserted mainland Southern California better than a century earlier. He built a home — complete with a $100,000 built-in echoing pipe organ — and made the island a personal fiefdom of sorts. Wrigley brought in deer and boar for hunting and made Catalina one of the first sea islands in the world developed for vacationing golfers. By 1922, the Chicago Cubs (also owned by Wrigley) were taking spring training on the island in a ballpark constructed to the exact dimensions of Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

With the West’s largest arts community just across the water, a casino was constructed in Avalon (the Channel Islands’ only incorporated town) for dances and theatrical events. Luminaries of Hollywood so loved the place that it became one of Tinseltown’s favorite shoot locations, even though getting there meant a boat or seaplane ride across 22 miles of ocean channel.

Today, Catalina Islanders take environmental stewardship very seriously — an attitude that, fortunately, extends beneath the surface of the surrounding Pacific waters. Almost from the moment you step off the ferryboat in Avalon, waters teeming with garibaldi (California’s state marine fish, a saltwater species that looks like a goldfish that’s been taking its vitamins) seem to be asking why you’re wasting your time in the air up there.

To return to your proper state — wet — you needn’t go far from the ferry docks. Casino Point Underwater Park, immediately adjacent to the birthday-cake-shaped casino, is set up as a buoy-marked dive-training area and includes reefs, the remains of a steel pier and a swim platform; it has four sunken vessels in or near it, including the concrete-hulled Sujac. During the winter, when boat traffic is minimal, you can apply to the harbormaster for permission to dive the Valiant, a luxury yacht that burned and sank, now resting in better than a hundred feet of water just west of the park. While there, you can join the generations of divers who have treasure-hunted on the wreck; the insurance claim after the loss included $67,000 for diamonds in a pewter box — but in the 76 years since the Valiant sank, no one has reported finding so much as a single diamond.

Divers can spend an entire diving career exploring Catalina waters — and some have. Farnsworth Bank, typically cited as the best dive in California, is composed of seamount pinnacles thickly decorated with purple hydrocoral and heavily visited by treefish, lingcod and, of course, the ubiquitous garibaldi. Bird Rock and Blue Caverns Point, a pair of sites north of Two Harbors, on the isthmus, join the list of bazillions of dive sites around North America where divemasters will tell you that the old Sea Hunt TV series was filmed. Here, though, the claims have the additional merit of being true.

Properly enjoying Catalina diving will entail the use of a boat — your own or a charter — and it’s possible to purchase packages that include ferryboat tickets, air fills, lodging at a diver-friendly hotel and boat diving. It’s an amazing place to visit, made even more so by the fact that the island lies just an oceanic hop, skip and jump from the most populous metropolitan area in America.

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