When I saw there was an article on diving the Galapagos in the July /
August 2005 Alert Diver, I smiled.  The title was "Extreme Adventure,
Meeting the Challenges of Diving the Galapagos Islands".  I eagerly
grabbed the magazine and a cup of coffee and went outside on the porch
to settle in for a few quiet minutes of reading this morning.  I had
hoped that the article would mention something that we did on our dive
trip there to the Galapagos eight months ago.

That trip was definately fun and I was glad that we booked on a
brand-new livaboard called M/Y Deep Blue.  The accommadations on the
boat were excellent and the crew was top-notch. Diving in the Galapagos
was way cool, although it was not as difficult as I thought it might be
from reports I'd heard.  Just this month, we were pleasantly surprised
to receive one 'movie' CD complete with music and two 'still shots' CDs
of the diving there from three of the ppl who were on our trip... so
the article in Alert Diver was even more a coincidence for me.   After
reading it,  I'm very disappointed and I just emailed DAN about the
article.

In the Alert Diver article, the main photo of the liveaboard shows M/Y
Pelagian, which is a liveaboard that we had the pleasure of being on
four years ago.  The Pelagian doesn't go to the Galapagos.  I tried to
overlook that because I realize that writers / photographers are often
given free booking to go on liveaboards like Pelagian and, as
professionals, they are not supposed to show favoritism by promoting
the liveaboard in their magazine write-ups. Thus, many shots of
liveaboards that we see in their articles are not really the ones the
writers stayed aboard...or the shot of the boat is just a bit out of
focus so that we can't identify it.  The Alert Diver writers didn't do
that this time.

The Alert Diver writers then decided to include wildlife photos from
Indonesia in an article about Galapagos... from the starfish to the
Komodo Dragon.  I was absolutely amazed to see that they would try to
pass off a Dragon as being part of the Galapagos.  They didn't have one
photo of a penquin, tortoise, seal, sea lion, iguana, blue-footed
booby, frigate, swallow-tail gull, kestral... or any of the things one
might see on land in the Galapagos.  Not one photo of Darwin's Station.
Not one above-water shot of the famous Darwin's Arch at the divesite.
No above-water shots of the hilltop where parts of the movie "Master
And Commander"  was filmed.  No underwater shots of turtles, Galapagos
blenny, yellow guinea fowl puffers, Galapagos blue nudis,
chocolate-chip stars.  No shots of schools of anchovy or bonitas or
barricudas.  No hammerheads or silky or Galapagoas sharks.

It's not bad enough that they messed up the photos, but the article
itself is boring and very uninformative.  No mention of dive sites, not
even about the famous "Gordon's Rocks",  which is the worst site there
IMHO because it's basically a glorified quarry dive with surge.  Every
dive shop and liveaboard promotes it as a great site yet I don't see
why, unless it's just about the volcanic formation.  The Alert Diver
writers mention the up and down currents which are something that are
very prevalent in my experience with diving Indonesia but not at all
with my dives in Galapagos.  They mention the "ten-finger dive" and
ruining their dive gloves because of it. Didn't their liveaboard tell
them about duct tape ??  LOL !!  I think the Alert Diver writers
combined diving in Indonesia with the 'thoughts of' diving in
Galapagos.  I think they didn't actually get to dive Galapagos at all
but had just landed in Galapagos and had a deadline to meet for the
story.  So I think they threw a story together and hoped that no one
would notice that they included pictures from another part of the world
and that their story sucked.

Maybe I need to start writing up my dive adventures and selling them. I
could be wrong but it seems like Alert Diver is in need of new writers
and photographers if this article is an example of their idea of good
diving magazine material.