Well when I last left you we were just getting ready to head out to Roca Partida and the site of our Super Bowl Sunday shindig. We arrived early in the morning to Roca Partida and prepared for our diving adventure. RP is one of those places that has the potential every dive to be mind blowing. Diving was good, not great this day as most of the big critters were down well over 100′. Over the next two days we did 8 dives all different and saw lots of sharks but the large mass stayed deep with a few exceptions, we had some large numbers of hammerheads came up, some silver tips and the shallowest of the larger sharks – Galapogos were hanging out in the 70′ range at times.
We did have an awesome Socorro Super Bowl Party, sitting on the sundeck, listening to the game, watching the humpback whales tail slap and breach fairly close to the boat as the sun was setting on the horizon it was pretty magical.
As we do we often venture out to see if we can find a friendly whale who would like to stare a diver in the eye. Perchance we found such a critter the very first time out. We had two animals that were within about 400 metres of the rockpile and I dropped my snorkelers in the water, it really is a game of chance, where I thought would be close to were the two animals might surface. After I cleared the area with the inflatable, it was maybe a minute later the humpbacks surfaced and then came back around and made a pass of the guests in the water. One whale at the surface and one travelling by underwater. They managed to get some great photos.
We thought that was pretty cool so went out in the afternoon to do another sortie see if we could get lucky a second time and low and behold we spied a larger group of whales being chased by 4 orcas. Two big bulls and two females. The orcas seemed to be trying to seperate one animal from the group but being in a small inflatable in the middle of the ocean with four orcas chasing the humpbacks made it seem imminently sensible to stay in the boat and away from the orcas.
Call them hunches or luck or whatever but we had originally planned to stay at Roca Partida for three days but after two days of deep stuff, we decided to head back a day early to San Benedicto.
When we arrived there was two other dive boats at the south end but we elected to go directly to the Canyon and we had 7 of the most wonderful dive experience that I can recall. We had Mantas and Dolphins by the gross, watching some of the video you see three or four mantas in the frame and then coming through is a stream of dolphins.
The last day of diving today saw the appearance of a tiger shark on a couple of occasions so a good number of the divers saw it with one up close swim by for one of the guests. He was later reading the marine id books to make sure what he saw was what he saw.
We finished with a dive at the canyon with a small group of diehards who wanted to squeeze the last minutes available in the water. They got some hammerheads. needless to say this trip has been wonderful both for the guests and the crew.
Join us on board for your own adventure, they are all different and we never try and predict what Mother Nature has in store for us.
All for now, write next week, we leave Cabo San Lucas for the islands on Saturday Morning.
Captain Al
Nautilus Explorer
Humpback whales being chased by 4 orcas!
