Scuba Lawyer
Contributor
P.S. All the liveaboards do land excursions as well.
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P.S. All the liveaboards do land excursions as well.
Different months and locations change everything, but I've done 78 degree temps there in a Polarfleece, (Wetsuit got lost and I'm not an easy fit for rentals) As with any such discussion, it's much more relevant to cite temperatures, dire warnings as the dry suit reference should be regarded as a fairly suspect opinion-better to focus on water temps and repetitive dive recovery...made it sound like if you're not in a dry suit,...
From other discussions way back, I'd been under the impression Wolf and Darwin were the best of the Galapagos diving sites, and generally reached by live-aboard. Is that true?
Do day boats get there, too?
If someone were headed to the Galapagos for one trip only, without the option (in time and/or money) to spend a few extra days on land, how appealing would the live-aboard route be vs. land-based?.
(Yes, done all three)
You might be unknowingly making a false assumption from the get go.
After many trips, I now dive Galapagos land based. Most "Americans" go liveaboard, but in reality, far and away, most visiting divers do it land based. I've seen enough Hammerheads without again enduring that 3 day slog back and forth to Darwin.
That said, the Galapagos is much more than diving. It is the history, the culture, the entire land based available experience. Can't get that bobbing around on a ship, the only thing that Cocos and Socorro offers.
Normally, I will travel great distances and skip things like the Pyramids (or go to Hawaii or NZ just to only ski), eschewing any tourism or lost dives due to drinking. The Galapagos is way beyond the experience afforded to "must do LOB" divers- locked on a ship with only a few hours on terra-firma. It is a real exception, but understood only by a very few.
As a wise person once observed: "Sometimes it is better to be lucky than to be good."From watching a lot of Galapagos trip report videos on youtube it seems the biggest difference between it and Socorro is that whale sharks don't seem to be a given at all on a Socorro trip, nor schooling hammerheads, but water clarity seems to be much better on average, and there's dolphins, seals, and lots of in your face manta action.
Galapogos videos from Aug-Oct all seem to have massive whale sharks show up, in your face encounters, schools of hammerheads (sometimes distant), seals, marine iguanas, not always mantas, and no dolphins.
And then I saw one Cocos videos from June 2012 that had just as many if not more hammerheads than Galapagos videos, in clearer water, closer.. and a whale shark, and dolphins, and even orcas! But no mantas. And most other videos didn't have whale sharks or orcas so I guess those are pretty rare.
Guess there's no where that has it -all-, reliably?