Hello from Isla San Benedicto, It's been a beautiful day here: Sunny, Warm, and lots of good diving!

Hello from Isla San Benedicto,

It's been a beautiful day here: Sunny, Warm, and lots of good diving. This morning we had the most colorful sunrise with bright oranges, reds, and a neon blue sky surrounding the silhouette of Isla San Benedicto. It was the island's way of telling us there were good things to come in the day ahead.

Our first dive was on the famous El Boiler. Dolphins greeted us from the surface as we briefed the dive site. As everyone prepared and watched the dolphins we had the song "beautiful day" pumping everyone up on the dive deck. The conditions in the water were quite favorable with visibility at 50 ft., 75 degree (F) surface temp. and a light surge, but no real current. As we jumped in the water we immediately had dolphins and mantas..  It seemed everywhere you looked there was something amazing. We had three mantas buzzing us while a group of 5 dolphins clicked and chirped away in front of us. The dolphins would stall in front of us with the their head up and tail down, then fall to the depths. This game seemed to bring great joy to these dolphins as they lingered in depths that brought us some
hesitation. This carried on for a good 20 minutes. In addition, we had a huge school of 200 yellowfin tuna stream by us again and again. This all happening at the same time left us breathless. Our group looked at eachother in amazement and left the water satisfied with our first great dive of the day.

Our second dive had similar conditions, but no dolphins. Instead, we had a dive filled with whitetip reef sharks and mantas. The whitetips were in their usual resting area, a ledge in the middle of the boiler at a depth of around 70 ft. It's typical to find five or six whitetip reef sharks piled on one another taking a siesta. We moved in close to watch them respire: water in their mouth, out their gill slits. They were cooperative so we did our best not to disturb them and took to the blue. There were large schools of jacks hanging nearby circling like a tornado of fish.  There were, of course, many mantas. We had no more than 5 mantas at any given time, but they kept revisiting the nearby cleaning station. As we
continued our dive, we recognized other manta individuals visiting the location. We counted at least 9 individual mantas on this one dive. 

El Boiler had been producing some great dives today so we stayed for a third. It was another great dive with sightings of countless green morays and lobsters filling almost every crevice in the rock. The mantas were there too with a grand total of 5 mantas. One manta dwarfed all the divers with a wingspan near 20ft. Wow!

We decided to mix things up a bit a had dive four at Las Cuevas. There was no current, visibility was 40 ft., and surface temp 75 degrees (F). We went to check out the boulders first looking for turtles, but instead finding Pacific Electric Rays, Green Morays, and Lobster. Then heading into the cave five  white tip reef sharks rested just inside the passageway into the big cave. We moved to the right as no to disturb them and they let us get quite close for some good pics. We made our way to the smaller cave which yielded two whitetips resting together. These sharks let us get very close and didn't budge an inch. So we observed at a
respectful distance for about five minutes before leaving them in peace. Some in the group wanted to do the caves again so of course we did. The sharks were still there and allowed us to stay in their presence for the remainder of our dive. A nice way to end the day.  

That's all for now from San Benedicto. Tomorrow, we're heading to Roca
Partida and looking forward to another beautiful day.

Until next Time,

Dave Valencia