The wind picked up a bit already in the morning, I would say that winds of about 10 knots were blowing all day, however, that didn’t stop us from diving and having great 3 dives at the legendary Roca Partida!
Leaving the Solmar V on the way to the pinnacle, a pod of about 10 bottlenose dolphins already waiting for us at the surface, so as soon as we jumped in to the water we intercepted them on the north point of the rock and we hung out with them for a brief time. They gave us pretty close passes and later vanished into the blue, and unfortunately didn’t come back again. After this fired up action right at the beginning of the first dive, we headed towards the east side of the rock to spend the rest of the first dive hovering between the thousands of fishes that reside in the rock, hundreds of Pacific Creolefishes, black, blue and white mouth Jacks, rainbow runners and the dozens of couple hundred pounds Yellow Fin Tunas that cruised all the time back and forth scaring all the small and baby fishes out.
On the second dive, one of the three dive teams decided to check the blue out and test their luck to find some Hammerhead Sharks, their luck was pretty good this time, they found a school of about 40 Hammers at 90’/27m, the beautiful sharks didn’t stay around long enough this time, anyways, the other two teams spent 60 minutes entertained by one of the super friendly Chevron Manta that seemed to enjoyed everybody’s bubbles and giving pretty close passes over our heads.
We decided to spent the third dive just diving shallow in no more than 50’/15m. However as soon as we broke the surface after back rolling from our pangas, 50 Hammerhead Sharks schooled together with couple dozens of Black Jacks at only 70’/20 m. so we had to readjust our dive plan and go for the sharks. Two of the of our divers stayed by the wall where the Whitetips relax, while taking a bunch of images, the same friendly Chevron Manta that we had seen already in the second dive, surprised them from behind and basically invited them to swim off the rock and hang out the rest of the dive.
Also, a group of 8-9 huge Galapagos Sharks got cleaned by the Barber fishes at the North point. This is how the second day at Roca Partida embraced us, right now we’re heading back to San Benedicto planning to start tomorrow diving El Cañón expecting to find more Hammerheads by this time at the common corner cleaning station, and also Dolphins again and more friendly Mantas, so stayed tuned for the next episode with the fellows of the SolmarV!
C’ ya later!
Erick Higuera
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