A lifetime opportunity to dive with 100 mobulas

We started the day with a gloomy overcast day, but the day improved with some fantastic action. The Nautilus Explorer had to tuck in to take shelter from some of the prevailing winds and had two quiet but enjoyable dives in the morning. In the afternoon we took our divers to the well known Fang Ming, a sunken chinese fishing vessel. It’s been sunk since 1999 and has lops of passage ways which makes it like an underwater playground for divers. We saved the best for last with a little experiment. We used a bunch of flashlights and sent them don to the sandy bottom at about 11m (33ft). The idea was the lights would attract the plankton, and the plankton would attract the mobulas. It didn’t take longer than 5 minutes and WE HAD MOBULAS! For those not there, mobulas are the smaller cousins of giant pacific mantas.
There may have been more than 100 circling us for more than an hour, joyously feeding on the microscopic plankton surrounding our lights. It was a success! The mobulas were above next to and sometimes under us, we couldn’t believe how active they were bumping into our cameras.

We all came up from the dive cheering at what an amazing, once in a lifetime opportunity this was. The Nautilus Explorer did it again 🙂