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Locals here in Ensenada are telling us that they have never seen such sustained and strong Santa Ana outflow winds. The good news is that the downtime gave us an extra 5 days to catch up on painting, varnishing, carpentry, welding repairs and such. The bad news is that winds blew up such a choking dust storm that it was impossible to get any painting done until the winds finally died down this morning.
Read MoreFreak conditions for sure with a large residual wave train travelling down the coast and colliding with the strongest sustained Santa Ana winds in Baja California that anyone can remember. It’s been blowing 35 – 40 knots in Ensenada for two days now with very reduced visibility in a miserable dust storm. Everyone in town is wearing dust masks, the power is flickering on and off and everything – EVERYTHING – on the Nautilus is covered with a thick layer of gritty dust. It hurts your eyes just to walk upwind.
Read MoreThe divemastesr soon found their own form however, snatching the tuna baits away from a large female with a severely broken tail who seemed to be working in tandem with “Chica,” who is a regular visitor when we are in Guadalupe. “Broken Tails” showed some very interesting behaviour – flicking her caudal fin against one of the transom cages and then later rubbing up against the same cage.
Read MoreWe made a slow bell north and tucked into the island – the drop in the swell was immediately noticeable and within a few minutes our brave and hardy guests were back in the comfort of cages. Whilst the action on the surface was a little less frantic than previous trips, our guests all seemed to exit the cages with a big smile with very good white shark sightings very close to the cages. Hopefully the big smiles weren’t simply because the sparkling clear hot tub was waiting for them along with a lovely hostess and her drink tray!!
Read MoreOur transit from Guadalupe Island back to Ensenada was uneventful with mild 6ft seas yesterday evening, mellowing out overnight to just a low swell for the morning. This was truly a lovely trip with a group of exceptionally warm and nice people onboard. The great white sharks weren’t bad either!!
Read MoreWe typically pull the shark cages out of the water at 4:30 p.m. on the last dive day but somehow, these darned white sharks must have figured out that timing (or one of them had a quick peak at the whiteboard in the main salon) because 3 of them showed up in force just before cage pulling time and made pass after pass. Our photographers were going nuts with the photo opportunities.
Read MoreInteresting note from Mauricio Hoyos, our very, very excited Mexican shark scientist friend on station on Guadalupe: for only the second time in four years, a predatory white shark event was witnessed. It happened just before we arrived. Chicka, a huge and beautiful female great white shark, captured an elephant seal and literally bit it’s head off. This apparently started quite a sequence of events including some very aggressive fighting over the carcass between the sharks (maybe that’s why we are not seeing many sharks today?). Mauricio was quite close to the event in his panga (skiff) and was able to capture everything on video. In fact on two different occasions during the feeding, sharks literally attacked Mauricio’s panga. He later commented that never before has a 22ft fiberglass panga felt so flimsy!! This is indeed a very interesting development.
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