Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Another amazing day with a lot of humpback whale action!

Hello!
Another awesome day at Roca Partida! It is hard to find words to describe how wonderful our day out here was, everything was just perfect we are all very grateful for the show that Mother Nature gave us today and at the Solmar V for making it possible for us to be here!
We woke up to another very calm day again, smooth ocean, no waves, no wind. Since the sun came out we started to see whales everywhere, close to the boat, around the rock and at the distance of course the question was, are we going to see them underwater again?  So we got in the pangas and headed to the rock, when we got close to it the whales were far away so no one was really expecting to see them on the dive.
The water once again was about 75F/23C and visibility about 70ft/21m. The dive started on the north side of the rock that had a massive cloud of jacks, creole and steel pampanos and at the bottom of it about 100ft/30m at least 10 galapago sharks and a couple of silver tips going around in circles. From there we headed south passing along the white tips on the east side and following the jacks, which seem to have a relation to the hammerheads. The jacks took us to the south part and there were the hammerheads!! A big school of at least 50 of them most around 130ft/40m and some were getting shallower to our level 100ft/30m. Then all of the sudden a big cloud covered the sun and when we looked up there she was again!!!! Big mama whale!!! After taking a breath she went down in front of us and just stopped there letting all the divers get close to her for about 15 minutes. And when we thought the dive couldn’t get better IT DID! A male came by started swimming around her and the mating ritual started the dancing and singing was amazing! All this with big tunas passing by, as our bottom time started to finish and we wanted to give the whales some privacy we finished the dive. We were all glad to see that this wale was ready to give another try to having a baby and we hope to see her back with it next year.
At the surface interval the whales were also putting on a show! Lots of groups breaching, some of them very close to the boat it was hard to decide where to look at. We went for the second dive thinking that it was going to be hard to top the first one, this time we started at the south side of the rock and saw the school of hammerheads again right away. The songs of the whales were very loud so we decided to get off the rock and try to look for them and once again we saw the big mama whale but this time she passed by quickly, still we kept swimming to see if we were going to see her again. After a while we thought that was it so we starter to shallow up and when we were at 40ft/12m we saw another whale just sitting there, this time it was a different female and guess what is also let us came close to her and once again another male came and stayed dancing right next to her the divers saw it for about 20 minutes petty much until they were low on air and after that from the surface snorkeling for another 10 minutes. On the last dive we saw the school of hammerheads again and some tunas passing by.
The day ended with a beautiful sunset and some great whale watching from the boat with at least 8 different groups of whales, maybe more, doing lots of breaches while we waited for our barbeque to be ready even after it got dark we could still listen to the whales breathing and breaching close to the boat.
Now we head to Socorro Island again with calm seas planning to do four dives at Cabo Pearce tomorrow, everybody is excited to see what comes next since this trip has been amazing so far.
Thiago Mendonca
Dive Instructor

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