Back to San benedicto!

We are back in San Benedicto, last day of diving of this trip and the dive site of the day is  “El Cañón”. We started the day with an stunning sunrise, everybody was very excited to get in the water and go explore the dive site,the sea was really really calm  as we were protected by the island from the wind.
6:45 dive briefing and 7am vamonos! The first dive couldn't been better, we had warm water, 80F/26C and strong north east current which means a very good chances to see hammer heads!
So as it was very calm we dove of the swimming platform of the Solmar V, a giant stride into the water and down the descent line we went. As we got to the rock, we had to hide to be protected from the current and started swimming towards the east corner of the dive site, on the way a chevron manta came to say good morning, but it disappeared as quick as it showed up.  We kept swimming and about half way to the east corner we stopped and hold on to the rocks, we had a lot of jacks, creolefish and other reef fish swimming around us and after waiting a few minutes patiently a school of probably about 50 hammer heads showed up! What a show, they started coming very close to us, a couple even swam in between some of our divers and this kept going for a few minutes, as we were running out of bottom time we started slowly crawling on the rocks back to the anchor, and hammer heads were still there, all swimming the same direction we were going, got to the anchor and we still had some hammer heads in front of us, and also a black manta went by! What a way to start the last day of the trip!

For the second dive we still had the same current so same plan! We went down the line and this time we didn't even have to swim too much, we just kicked a few meters off the anchor and there they were again! They kept circling in front of us! And again a black and a chevron manta showed up by the end of the dive to pose for some pictures!
For our third dive of the day current switched and now it was coming from the south south east, this change stirred the sand up and visibility was not great, about 40ft, but we still saw some cool stuff. So after the descent we swam to the other side of the dive site and there holding on to the rocks we had the chance to see two silver tip sharks circling several times in front of us, next to us on top of the rocks we had 4 white tip reef sharks facing the current and a lot of reef fish, waited and waited but no hammer heads came this time, so we let go off the rocks and drifted along the rocks, on our way we saw a solo hammer head that came very close to us and a massive school of big eye trevallys to end up our dive with 4 mantas that were kind of dancing with each other!

Because of the low visibility we decided to move and end the trip diving “El Boiler”, so after lunch we moved and the last dive was really nice, the visibility was better than at “El Cañón”, around 70ft/21m,and on this dive we just went down to play with the mantas, 5 of them showed up and played with us for the entire dive, man these mantas love their bubble baths!

Now we are heading back to Cabo and this group is having a blast, they are in the salon drinking margaritas, prepared by our steward Luis, playing music, joking with the dive masters...sorry I have to go and have fun... I will write to you again soon!

And just to clarify, the crew is not drinking, we have to keep the boat a float!

Antonio
Dive Instructor