As one of the dive masters on the Nautilus Explorer, you may think that I will only write wonderful things about our diving here. Sorry, however I won’t!! We dived at Isla Socorro today, where we had to check in at the Navy base (as we do on every trip) they arrived at 8.30am and we were on our way to our first dive. Which was fabulous, manta swirled around all over the place. What was interesting about the manta we saw was that they all had their cephalic lobes extended despite the fact that they were coming in to the cleaning stations. When a manta approaches a cleaning station it usually has both its cephalic lobes curled up. It seems that these mantas were torn between being cleaned by the Clarion angel fish and hoovering up all the plankton that was in the water. Either way, it meant that we were happy to have mantas swirling around us for most of the dive. Our second dive proved to be a touch more adventurous‚ as the current had picked up and was really pretty. Perky.. When I say perky I mean we went down the line hand over hand to the dive sight! The reward for this effort was mantas for the entire dive, swirling in and out to either pass by looking at the divers or to come in and hover over the cleaning stations. The visibility was not as good as we hoped due to all the plankton in the water however that did not stop every single diver seeing mantas on our dive. The finale of this dive was when we had 4 dolphin come by us as the last of the divers were making their way up the line. Our last dive was also good in a whole different way. A couple of manta cruised by at the very start however after that everyone got stuck in to looking at the small stuff. We saw tons of octopus, a couple even making baby octopus!!
Belinda – Dive Master
The current was really perky but it was worth it as giant mantas were swirling around for the whole dive. Socorro Island, Mexico.
