We had everything on our first day at Roca Partida!

Here we are again at Roca Partida, yesterday after diving “El Boiler” we decided to navigate to Roca Partida as the weather report was indicating we were going to have a couple of days of good weather. The crossing was not smooth, but not super bad either, and this morning we woke up next to the rock, the water was calm, a light breeze was blowing from the north and everybody was excited and ready to dive!
7:45 dive briefing and off we went on the pangas, as we entered the water we noticed it was quite clear and warm, about 80ft/24m visbility and 79F/26C at depth, a light current from the north made it easy to dive all around the rock, were we were expecting to find sharks but unfortunately they were hanging out in deeper waters, any way we did spot a few, on the first dive as soon as we descended to 95ft/29m we had 2 sharks, one Galapagos and one silver tip that circled the same area a couple of times before disappearing into the blue waters, after that we went looking for hammer heads on the south west side were we saw a big school of big eye trevallies, and as we know they usually hang out more less close to the schooling hammer heads thats were we went, after hovering patiently at 105ft/35m we had 2 hammer heads that came very very close to us, especially one that swam right underneath the divers while the other one waited a little deeper, after a few minutes of watching them we started ascending a bit and at 60ft/18m another hammerhead came close to the group for a few seconds. So then we went north, were we found a lot of schooling jacks and creole fish, so we started ascending to our safety stop and for our surprise there were 2 silky sharks chasing a little school of striped bonitos, nice end for the first dive of the day!
For our second dive we had a little bit more current coming from the north west this time the highlight was a bunch of white tip reef sharks swimming in circles on the north west corner and a chevron manta that came across the group 3 times during the dive, by the end of the dive it just stayed with us and got really friendly, it came to get here bubble bath several times before we had to start heading back to the surface. So by this point the dives were good, but not really what were expecting so we said that the third dive will be the dive to make the decision to either stay another day in Roca or go to Socorro island...and for our surprise we went on our third dive of the day and... We had everything! We went down on the north west corner and descended to 120ft/36m were we were hovering with the rock on our back and in front of us a wall of fish, creole, black jacks, cotton mouth jacks, big eye trevallies, trigger fish, all kinds and in between them, SHARKS!!! Galapagos, a lot of silkys, silver tips, white tips, everything right in front of us, even a few big yellow fin tunas chasing bait fish! After about 15minutes into the dive, WHALESHAAAAARK! A juvenile of about 25ft/8m swam about a meter away from the group, very slowly, we stayed there hoping it was going to come back but nothing, so we started swimming south along the west wall and here comes a chevron manta, slowly swimming a little above the group, everybody was paying attention to it while the whale shark was actually in between us and the rock!...it actually almost run over one of the divers! So second time we see it and everybody is doing happy dances underwater haha....so we kept going slowly drifting with the current and when we hit the south west corner there was another whale shark probably a 20ft/6m one, this time swimming bellow us at about 90ft/27m! So I guess you can imagine what the decision was after this dive...we are staying one more day in Roca Partida hoping to see this majestic whale sharks once again!


Antonio
Dive Instructor