Greetings from Isla San Benedicto! We arrived to the island around 3pm in glorious conditions. The sun was shining, the sea was calm and dolphins welcomed us by bow riding along the Solmar V. We have the "Pelagic Life" group here this week so we're focusing much of our efforts on blue water interactions. So we jumped in the pangas a few miles from the island after spotting some groups of birds. We sped over to the birds diving in the water to find a baitball. This baitball had two striped marlin and a lone bottlenose dolphin. They were feeding on the last remnants of the bait as we arrived. After about 10 minutes, the bait was gone and we jumped on the pangas to look for more. We had some more luck with more baitballs, some with silky sharks, some with only bait, and another with more striped marlin and a sailfish. A good start to the week and not a bad introduction to our pelagic life here at san benedicto.

We still had one check out dive to do and found ourselves at Las Cuevas. The conditions were great with 70 ft. visibility and a surface temperature of 75 degrees (F). There was a ton of fish action in the water: jacks everywhere and even some yellowfin tuna feeding. We spotted a whitetip reef shark swimming around. We also found a skeleton. This skeleton was found by us last week for the first time. It's a false killer whale skeleton and still had meat on it. It must have been there for at least three weeks. It's intact and there naturally so it's a very rare and interesting find. We cruised around the rest of the dive checking out the caves and the many rays that happened to be around today.

A pretty good start to our week of diving the Revillagigedos. Tomorrow we're diving El Canon here and hopefully looking for some more baitball action. Until next time...

Dave Valencia