Another beautiful day at one of our favorite dive sites!

We awoke to the calmness of our anchorage. The sun rose in an explosion of reds and oranges. The island seemed to soak up the colors and glowed in this morning's light.

Our diving today took place once again at one of our favorite dive sites. It was calm on our first dive, with great visibility of 80'+, and a temperature of 73 degrees (F). We dove this site yesterday so people knew what they wanted out of it. We headed to a drop off looking for hammerheads. My group had a good sighting of 5 or so hammerheads, but the sharks kept to themselves. Dani's group headed into the blue and were treated to 30 or so hammerheads swimming around them. After the hammerhead hunt, we ascended to the cleaning station where a few mantas were already gathered. We had three mantas circling around the divers for the rest of the dive. We watched as they performed their mesmerizing ballet of flips and pirouettes for our cameras.

Between dives we had some surface sightings of dolphins and humpback whales on the dive site so we were anticipating big things for our second dive. Instead of finding those marine mammals we were treated to MUCHAS mantas. We had at least five mantas at one time and many more individuals stopped by the cleaning station. The mantas were very playful and interactive stalling over divers and posing for lots of pictures! What made this dive unique was the many bright orange clarion angelfish mobbing the mantas and quickly cleaning them. The bright orange is a beautiful contrast to the black and white coloration of the massive mantas.

Our third dive had two mantas at the beginning but it must have been late
because after a few minutes of interaction, they said adios and swam into the blue and... The group was satisfied to turn to the reef and inspect all the life that was waiting for us! This site in particular houses so many octopus and it's rather common to observe mating, competition, and hunting behaviors. We also saw many tropical flounders, green morays, and a new sighting of nudibranchs: red-tipped sea goddess. We even saw a large school of tuna swim by a couple of times.

It was a happy day of diving here on Socorro and we look forward to even
BETTER diving tomorrow at Isla San Benedicto.

Until next time!
Dave Valencia