Sunday, June 22, 2014

We couldn't have asked for a better end to our 2013-2014 Socorro season!

What a way to close the last trip of the season with 13 different Mantas and a 10 foot whale shark at El Boiler!
Arriving back to San Benedicto at 6:00 am and realizing that the water conditions had changed a lot since the last time we're here when we did the check out dive. The visibility had improved a lot and the water had warmed up to 78F/25, definitely a big difference. Anyway, we started the last day of the trip diving at El Cañón, since we were having the dive briefing, about 5 dolphins awaited for us alread! This time there was a new member in the pod, a little cute baby dolphin that was kept among two adult dolphins just to be protected from predators. This time we weren't lucky with Hammerhead Sharks, however, besides the dolphins, we saw 3 different Mantas and one of them hung out around the divers basically for the entire dive.
We moved to El Boiler the test our luck there, and we were very lucky, on the first dive as soon as we descended down the anchor line, 12 Dolphins escorted all of us from one side of the pinnacle to the other, close to 15 min were spent swimming with dolphins. Later on they took off and disappeared in the blue. The visibility and water temp had improved in El Boiler as well. After the dolphins went away, the rest of dive was completed with 4 Mantas that kept coming back and forth to one of the "steps" of El Boiler just to enjoy the typical bubble massage.

The second dive in El Boiler was after lunch, by that time 4 more Mantas had arrived to the dive site to be participants of the cleaning session by Clarion Angelfishes. 
Fourth and last dive of the season and the visibility dropped a little but it was still good enough to see the Mantas coming by and position ourselves to give them bubble massages them right over our heads. While we watched how 3 Mantas dance in a majestic and synchronized move, a baby male Whale Shark made his appearance and swam in between the Mantas just to stop by the top of the pinnacle! This baby whale shark was just swimming in circles coming back and forth to around the anchor line, all we did was hang on the line to avoid get blow away by the current and enjoyed the parade of 3 Mantas escorting the spotty shark for a brief moment, and last but not least while we watched the whale shark 6 Dolphins cruised by the reef.
Some of the divers that had returned back to the boat and didn't see the whale shark during the dive, spotted it from the surface and had the chance to jump back to water and snorkeled only with this friendly giant that didn't want leave the dive site.
Such a great way to finished the last trip of the Socorro's Islands Nov 2013-June 2014 Season, it could not have been better!

My friends, we did incredible dives in this fall-winter-spring season, thanks a lot to all those divers that were part of these incredible adventures with the SolmarV! Now we´re looking forward to going to Guadalupe Island for the Great White Shark Season, hopefully we´ll see you there! Hasta la siguiente temporada!
SolmarV Dive Instructor
Erick Higuera

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