NGL N24.19.768 W110.13.136
clear sky, no wind, no swell, the Cerralvo channel is a lake. air temp 29C, water temp 21C, visibility 7-8 meters. Occasional patches of red tide.
Hello everybody,
NGL is cruising the north of Cerralvo channel. Last night we were anchored at El Saltito for the night. Like every night, I informed the guests that we would put lights in the water and hope for mobulas to come and feed on the plankton. This happened a few times on those trips, but after 2200 everybody went to sleep. I asked them if they would like to be awakened, but nobody liked the idea to be pulled out of bed…except Beatrice.
Come 2200, a big school of mobulas shows up, frenziedly feeding on the plankton accumulated at the surface under the floodlights. I ran to Beatrice’s room and woke her up to one of the most mesmerizing experiences: 20 minutes later she was floating among dozens of mobulas, in the middle of an elegant ballet of these rays, their cephalic fins funneling the plankton into their wide open mouths. At breakfast today, everybody asked me to anchor in the same place and wake them up if the rays show up again!
Yesterday afternoon we did a dive at El Saltito. visibility was 7-8 meters, it was a shallow dive with lots of different Cortez reef fish, nudibranchs, and jawfish and there was a school of jacks hovering around the dive site. The guests were pleased with the dive.
This morning we started the day with a long stretch of mobulas jumping in the channel about 1nm off the shore. We went in the water to find several small schools and guests were swimming for about 2 hrs. Then a mummy and baby humpback showed up for a nice whale-watching experience before breakfast. Later, after breakfast, we found a pod of long-beaked common dolphins, about 50. Guests went in the water with them after we had the dolphins do acrobatics jumps in the wake of the NGL. Then we encountered a pod of 30-40 bottlenose dolphins, with whom we did the same. Dolphins have been shy with guests in the water but demonstrate their skills close to the RHIB and the NGL.
