Roca Partida as we know it from the surface is a guano covered rock extending about 100 feet into the air and about 200 feet in length, poking up out of the pacific ocean 60 nautical miles from the nearest island of Socorro. In the bigger picture it is the very tip, the last second of a 11,000 foot underwater volcanic mountain. Our great luck that in its formation it managed to break the surface of the ocean, providing us with one of the best big animal dive sites anywhere in the world.
We’ve just finished a day of diving here, starting at 0700 and finishing the day just as the sun was setting over the horizon, completing 4 great dives. With a water temp of 26-27C, and visibility around 100 feet, conditions were perfect to enjoy the amazing diversity of pelagic animals that live and feed here. In four dives today we enjoyed at least two giant pacific mantas on multiple dives, schooling hammerheads, galapagos, silky, silver-tip and white-tip sharks, huge yellow-fin tuna hunting the schools of creole fish, schooling cotton mouth jacks, trevally and black jacks, prowling wahoo, and the highlight an adult whale shark circling the rock on our 3rd dive of the day.
If you can tear your eyes away from the big fish, you’ll find a vertical wall dropping almost straight down to more than 200 feet, with cracks full of moray eels piled one on top of the other, octopus and lobsters. Small shelves house schools of white-tip reef sharks, lined up one alongside the other like sardines.
We have another full day of diving tomorrow here at this big animal mecca before we head back into Cabo San Lucas for our next group of lucky divers. Right now it’s time to go cash in on a whale shark bet I made earlier today.
– Captain Gordon Kipp
Diving conditions: water temp 26C, viz 100ft+, mild current Surface conditions: air temp 30C, mostly sunny skies, wind light
