NGL is at las Animas
The sky is lightly covered, the air temperature is 38C, light breeze from southeast, choppy seas but no swell, the water temp 29C, and visibility is 15+ meters.
Guests are ready for the second dive at las animas. On our way here this morning, we encountered a small pod of bottlenose dolphins, about 10-15 individuals. They were jumping high and doing acrobatic flips in front of the bow of the NGL. We got the guests onboard the rhib and tried to snorkel with them but they were not interested in the rhib or human watching. Guests were very happy to see them from the boat.
The first dive was in la Cueva de las animas, on the north side. It was a beautiful dive site, 1 sea lion was playing in the cave, and lots of glassfish and lobsters as well. Divers went deeper into the thermocline looking for hammerheads but encountered none. The next dive will be in the sealion bay and hopefully, the hammers will show up! We will do 2 more dives here including a night dive before heading to Cerralvo for the last day of diving.
Yesterday evening we did a beautiful night dive in San Francisco. It was Haley’s first night dive and she was blown, like the rest of the divers, by the bioluminescence, the numerous sea cucumbers eating and moving like worms of DUNE, the hunting eels, the sleeping fishes, and the numerous shells under the millions of stars of Baja California sky.
Yesterday afternoon we had a surprising encounter with a blue whale! Between dive 2 and 3, we sailed around the San Jose channel and southeast of San Francisco on the lookout for big animals. We did not find much and were on our way back to the dive site when a juvenile blue whale (around 8-9 meters) was spotted right next to the boat! we stopped the boat about 300 meters away from the animal and the whale swam right up to the boat and circled the Gallant Lady for 15 minutes, passing very close to the bow and the stern to the amazement of the guests.
I had rarely seen that behavior in whales and never with blue whales! We know that blue whales migrate inside the sea of Cortez, there is actually a mating a birthing area in the national park of Loreto, and the whales travel north or southbound from the Pacific close to shore. We see them often during their migration that lasts until the end of May – Mid-June. So, it was very curious to see that 1 blue whale so late in the year!
The fact that it is a juvenile may explain the curious behavior, as it was discovering its environment, and any new floating object the size of a boat like NGL can arouse curiosity. This whale may have just decided to spend the whole year in the sea of Cortez. We know that fin, Sei, and Bryde’s whales stay here all year long and find food in abundance, so why not that pretty blue whale? No matter what it was an exceptional encounter for our guests on our diving trips.
1 more on the list of this trip – after the friendly and playful sea lions, the cute hairy Guadalupe fur seals, the cheeky bottlenose dolphins, the numerous turtles, octopus, nudibranchs, moray eels and schools of fish that inhabit the reefs, and the splendid bioluminescence during the night dives.
