Location: Roca Partida, Socorro/Revillagigedo Islands, Mexico
Comments: Today is dive day 2 at Roca Partida and the scuba diving has been super hot. Mantas were somewhat elusive earlier on this trip with just sporadic sightings each day (other than a fabulous dive at The Boiler which was on fire with fantastic manta behaviour).
We’ve come to expect amazing up close manta interaction and I get a bit stressed when that isn’t happening during a trip. Luckily all the pieces fell into place when we arrived at Roca Partida yesterday morning. We saw loads of manta rays ie. I back rolled off the inflatable and within 45 seconds a full grown male manta presented itself to me in a vertical position right in front of my nose. It was as if he was saying “hey, where have you been, I’m going to just hang out here with you for a while.”
In the course of that same dive we had 2 mantas cavorting with us for 15 minutes on the edge of the blue between 80 and 100 feet and then 2 different mantas doing fly-bys in the shallows at the end of our dive. It was great!! Other divers spotted a nice whale shark circling the pinnacle but I never did glimpse him.
My last dive today was even more special. We were hanging off the north end of Roca Partida in the shallows with 10 or so divers below us and their bubbles streaming to the surface. The positioning of the divers was such that the bubbles looked like vertical curtains with a passageway between them. I was busy admiring this when a giant manta swooped in beside me and flew straight down the alleyway, twisting and turning around the veil of bubbles. It was beautiful. And then he turned around and did the whole thing over again leaving no question in my mind that this intelligent animal was clearly and deliberately playing in the divers’ bubbles. Hard not to love these guys.
–Captain Mike
