Location: Shark Bay, Guadalupe Island, Baja California, Mexico.
Divemaster Sten and Sharkmaster Sam reporting. Buzz and Mike are both on time off right now. The crossing at the end of the last trip was mirror smooth with just a very long soft swell. You could have woken up this morning and believed that you were already back in port. We get crossings like this about 1/4 of the time, the rest of the crossings usually have a 5 – 6 foot swell which is comfortable on a stabilized steel ship like the Nautilus. We have to be honest and admit that a couple of times each season we do get seas that are bigger than that unfortunately but nothing the good ol Nautilus can’t handle. The highlight of the crossing was an adult blue whale surfaced very close to the Nautilus 25 miles back from Ensenada. Arrived back at Shark Bay, Guadalupe Island at dinnier time after another easy crossing and got our cages set up before turning in for the night. Sharking started out slowly on October 4th but just got better and better after breakfast. We could easily see the anchor chain at the bow of the Nautilus from the cages and estimated the visibility at 150 feet in VERY blue water. During the day we had at least 8 individuals. Shredder a big scarred male we only seen once this season came and visited us a few times. Happy to see him back again, last year he was with us almost every trip. An unidentified big and very round female we saw first time last week made closer passes. She is so round around her girth that it looks like she is pregnant. The sharks had an tendency to be a bit low, but the lowering and resurface the submergible cage made them come up more often and do several close passages both surface and deeper down. Several times we had the mackeral panicking and the yellowfin tunas in the hunt behind them. A couple of times we witnessed group of 3-4 tunas or sometimes a single tuna “tailing” the great white shark the same way we have seen rainbow runners stroking themselves against the shark’s sandpapery skin. We ended the day with an inflatable tour along the shoreline and were accompanied by hundreds of bottlenose dolphins. They where everywhere!! We also took a look at the Guadalupe fur seals. Interesting to note that they are close relatives of bears and trace the same lineage back 65 million years. Finished the day off with a lovely dungeness crab feast under the stars on the upper sun deck.
Weather: Mostly sunny, flat calm seas, temperature in the mid 70’s..
Water: Visibility 150 feet, water temperature 69 degrees.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myz0wmsJhIo
Flat calm crossing from Guadalupe Island – smooth as glass
