Gianta Mantas, hammerheads, and more at San Benedicto!

Hello friends!

Day 14 on our combo trip Guadalupe-Socorro!

This morning we woke up next to the majestic San Benedicto Island ready to see what “El Cañón” had prepared for us. So 6:45am dive briefing and by 7am everybody was into the water!
The water was splendid, 27C/82F, about 90ft/27m visibility and a very light east current what made our way out to the cleaning station very easy, on the way we spotted a lot of huge lobsters, scorpion fish, schools of jacks, a lot of reef fish a juvenile silver tip shark swimming around the edge of the wall and once we got to the cleaning station waited there for a few minutes and as we saw no action off we went into the blue waters looking for schooling hammer heads! Unfortunately the current was not strong enough to bring them all together but we did see some of them “dancing” in the blue waters, we even saw a little bunch of 4 scalloped hammer heads as we headed back towards the boat and right after that a MANTA!!! A 6m chevron manta came across our divers and played with us all the way back to the boat, we even spent our safety stop looking down watching this great animal swimming so gracefully.
Our second dive at “El Cañón” we did not have any mantas, but everything else was still there! What we did have however was a pod of bottle nosed dolphins that came to play with us for a few minutes! These elegant dolphins played around kind of smiling at the divers, it was fantastic! Everybody had the same smiles we saw on the dolphins once we got back to the boat...it was just great!

For our afternoon dives we moved to “El Boiler”, a big pinnacle where we usually spot the giants of the pacific, the Giant Manta Rays, and yes they were there today! On our first dive as soon as we hit the water we had 4 mantas 1 black and 3 chevron that played with us for the entire dive! Also we had a couple of silky sharks and silver tip sharks that came by the boat to entertain everybody on their safety stop. For our second dive at “El Boiler” we had 2 other mantas that played with us again, all and all possibly the best couple of dives of this trip, what do you think?


Antonio
Dive Instructor