June 9, 2004 - Wolf - Shark Bay Point (Dives 4,5)

Whale sharks are here!! Oh, and there are also many schools of scalloped hammerheads, lots of different types of jacks, black and green turtles, large moray eels, scorpionfish, and much, much more. We dove twice at the point near Shark Bay on Wolf, and had multiple encounters with whale sharks almost immediately; the other group saw a whale shark within a few minutes of entering the water, but we had to look a bit harder for our sighting. I was able to get much closer to hammerheads today than on previous trips, but they were very hard to photograph because they were often below me in the darkness, where it is virtually impossible to get a clean image. Still, I had one approach me head-on until he was only about a foot away from my dome port. *click*

June 11, 2004 - Wolf - The North Caves (Dive 13)

The afternoon was spend at Wolf, where we dove the North Caves, one of my favorite dive sites in Galapagos. There are white-tips, puffers, squirrelfish, lobsters, shrimp, moray eels, and numerous turtles at the site, and once we emerged from the caves, we flew in drift along the northern wall (fighting occasional up and down currents). A lone sea lion came down and joined our group for a few minutes, clicking and growling audibly as he drifted with us.

After the dive, Antonio took us into a large, hidden cave in Wolf Island, near our anchorage. The entrance to the cave was tricky and had to be timed with the surge so we wouldn't bash our heads into the rocky opening. Once we were inside, the ceiling expanded upward into a large cavern, and we poked around in search of a lone male sea lion that Antonio says lives in the cave. From behind us, the water glowed a brilliant aquamarine from light trickling in from the entrance