In almost every sport there is the ultimate event -- something that most people never get to experience, but all wish for and dream about. In the golfing world there is the hole-in-one; in the baseball world, there's being down by 3 runs bottom of the 9th, game 7 of the world series, 2 outs, 2 strikes, bases loaded, and hitting a grand slam home run to win the series; in basketball, it's hitting the 3 pointer with no time left on the clock in double overtime from under your own basket to win the championship; in bowling, it's rolling that 300 game. You get the picture.
In diving, the ultimate experience is diving with the largest fish on the earth -- the whale shark. Few divers ever get a chance to catch a glimpse of them underwater. We don't even know for sure how they reproduce since it's never been recorded. If you run into a diver who's seen one, all ears perk up to listen to the story, as even the most seasoned of divers are awed by them.
I've just spent the last 3 weeks doing large pelagic diving in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. I had 5 sightings in 4 dives of at least 3 distinct whale sharks. 4 of the 5 sightings, I was within arms reach of the whale shark, and in 2 of the sightings, I spent significant time swimming or hanging out with the animal. The largest one was over 40 feet long, the smallest about 25. Now I've been in the water with lots and lots of sharks in my years of diving, but there is nothing that can compare to the feeling of swimming along side a 40 foot long, 10 foot wide shark. Even when they are barely moving their fins, they cruise through the water with such power and grace that it left me in complete and utter awe.
In between whale shark encounters, we dove with schools of hundreds and hundreds of 8 to 12 foot hammerhead sharks. At times the school was so thick above you, you couldn't see the surface. We had one dive where we spent about 15 minutes playing with bottle-nosed dolphins. Now encounters with dolphins while snorkeling is fairly common, but they are exceptionally rare on scuba. I've always been told that the dolphins don't like the bubbles and the noise, and my experience, they always stay out of range of divers. These stayed with us for quite a while, buzzing us, playing in the water, and making sounds. We saw manta rays, Galapagos sharks, white-tipped sharks, turtles, eagle rays, and tons and tons of sea lions. And, we snorkeled with the cutest little penguins -- the only penguins that live north of the equator.
All in all, a great trip, although a few days before we were to come back, about 150 miles away from civilization (and I do use that word civilization loosely), we had both generators on the boat fail. Bad enough we had no power, no lights, no refrigeration, no running water, no desalinator, but we had no compressor. (I could handle all the other stuff including eating salad sandwiches for two days, but no compressor put a damper on the diving....) Anyhow, fortunately, the only thing that did work on the boat was the main engine, so we came back to the inhabited part of the archipelego early.