Swimming with Sharks?

For those of you who read yesterday's entry and wanted to know if we survived the hammerhead sharks, clearly, we did. Sadly, there were no sharks! Here's the background. When we were in Indonesia doing our dive certification, there were many experienced divers there. When asked what their dream dive trip would be, invariably the Galapagos came up. It now seems clear to me that the Galapagos is a dream dive spot for experienced divers. We are not. Many of the cool dives here require a minimum number of past dives (like 40 or 60). Since we had only 4 under our belts, we were restricted to tamer locations. Some aspects that make experience necessary are large waves, poor visibility and currents. Even at the beginner dive sites that we went to, all of these were major factors. As it turns out, we saw lots of rocks and some uninspiring fish. Although Paul is still looking fairly morose, here's the bright side as I saw it:

• I, challenged diver that I am, successfully descended and ascended three times in poor conditions without crying or panicking.
• We saw (on the shore/surface) a blue footed booby, dive-bombing birds fishing for lunch, a lizard, many basking sea lions and three turtles.
• We had a very fun boat ride in waves ranging from 6-14 feet.