Thursday, December 8, 2011

Another Beautiful Day at San Benedicto

Buen Dia from Solmar V,

It's been a good day of diving here in San Benedicto. We started things off with a beautiful dive at El Canon. The water is getting a little cooler with a surface temp. of 75 degrees (F) and beautiful visibility at 70-80 ft. Upon making our way to the corner there was a slight current heading south. This current is not ideal for hammerhead action, but we were still hopeful. Within minutes we had a small group of three hammerheads manifest from the blue. One behind the other. We had a few glimpses of single hammerheads here and there with a total of ten sightings for the dive. The highlight was while sitting at the corner waiting for sharks, we had two bottlenose dolphins show up to play. They were very friendly swimming circles around us, posing for pics, and chasing jacks. It was a great show and lasted some 15 minutes. A nice dive to start off the day.

El Canon was to be dive two. The visibility was still nice at 60', but the current changed slightly heading east. We sought out for more hammerhead sightings. The first two groups headed to a corner to the north and had a nice school of 20-30 hammerheads. They stuck around for about 5 minutes. After that is was pretty quiet so we enjoyed the many jacks and creolefish.

Dive three was again at El Canon. The visibilty was still very good and only a slight current going east. This dive was spent spotting the many green morays, fine spotted morays, lobster, and scorpionfish. We fished the dive with a gentle drift with the current to be picked up by the pangas. A nice relaxing dive.
Our final dive of the day was at El Boiler. We started the dive on the pinnacle just east of the boiler. At 70' this pinnacle is covered in life.. Jacks and burrito grunts congregate here in large schools. We also spotted two octopus hunting and a colorful tropical flounder. From there we headed to the west side of the boiler in search of mantas. We immediately spotted a huge school of a hundred or so jacks. The school surrounded us and through the school came the manta. Then another manta swam closer to join the fun. We sat there enjoying the company of the two chevron mantas and a huge school of jacks for nearly ten minutes. To end our dive we headed to the cleaning station. In the shallow area of the cleaning station there were lots of whitetip sharks, lobster, and green morays. A black manta then apparated from afar and visited us and the cleaning station. This
manta was the same one we saw earlier this week. We watched as it swam circles around the group and got cleaned by the bright orange clarion angelfish. Another beautiful day here in San Benedicto.

Saludos,
Dave Valencia

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