Diving - Nth Seymore and Mosquera Islands

Jane had decided to fit in a couple of days diving (leaving Drew to sleep in peace) so picked up her gear from the Scuba Iguana soon after arrival on May 23rd. She had early starts the next two days since the divers first took taxis (dual cab utes) back to the Itabaca canal then a boat out to the dive sites.

The first day we headed north of Baltra Island to dive off North Seymore Island and then the low sandy Mosquera Island. Although almost on the equator, we dove in 5 ml wetsuits (the guide had a dry suite) because of the cold water from the Humboldt Current (about 20 – 21⁰). I should not have been surprised that there were no coral reefs – there were in fact some grey boulder corals, a few bright orange fist-sized clusters of polyps and some branching black coral with yellow polyps. However, unlike Tasmania’s very colourful encrusting animal life and lots of different algae growing on the rocks, these rocks were almost barren except for fuzzy brown algae and the ubiquitous giant barnacles in the shallows. Quite a few large seastars were grazing on the rocks, including choc-chip stars, blue or red Linkia, pencil urchins and a species of long-spined purple Centrostephanus. The latter may be the cause of the depauperate algal species.

However the fish life was abundant, with schools of surgeon fish, grunts, barracuda, families of parrot fish and wrasse and numerous other species feeding on the algae on the rocks. Big beautiful queen angel fish were very common around the boats waiting for scraps. It was also notable that, not only were there lots of fish, there were lots of BIG fish.  And apparently the fish life now is only a shadow of its former self since fishing is allowed in many areas of the marine park.  Some eastern Pacific fish species were present, such as the flute mouths and later when snorkelling we saw Moorish Idols.

But most exciting were the rays and sharks – I saw mostly white-tipped sharks but several different, large rays. During our surface interval between dives we were able to enjoy watching the frigate, tropic birds and blue-footed boobies wheel and dive (boobies) around the island (we visited this island again and saw the birds at close quarters). The Mosquera dive was an enjoyable drift dive along with the current, mostly over sand along the edge of the reef with large schools of fish.