Friday, February 20, 2015

Dancing dolphins, friendly mantas, and hump back whale song at Socorro island!

Hello again!

So we left Roca Partida last night and headed to Socorro Island, the crossing took us about 8 hours and it was very smooth. This morning we woke up next to Socorro island with a very calm sea, sunrise was spectacular as it always is on this islands and as soon as we had sun light we went into the water in Cabo Pearce, our dive site of the day.

For our first dive we had a water temperature of 75F/24C, a visibility of 60ft/18m and a quite strong current coming from the north so we went on the pangas to the north wall to make it easier to descend and go into the dive site with the current, so we dropped and as soon as we looked down we had a chevron manta right underneath us, it didn't stay to play, it only kept swimming so we headed east along the wall, we got to the cleaning stations but no mantas... so we went up the rocks and down on the other side to protect us from the current and went to check out the south wall, when we got there we could hear a very very loud humpback whale singing! It was probably very close, but we could not see it, so we stayed there waiting for mantas or the whales, but we got dolphins instead! First 2 bottle nose dolphins came to play with us, they were very very curious and went around the whole group and then started kind of dancing with each diver one at the time, after about 5 minutes they left and a few minutes later they came back, but this time there was 5 of them! Even better! So the dancing kept going on for another 20 minutes! Dolphins will swim up and down around the divers, they came very very close to us, and you can see how they look at you wanting to interact, they are just such smart animals, anyway after the dolphin dance we look at our gauges and obviously we where low on air so it was time to start coming up. Once back on the boat everybody was still very excited and two of the divers could not believe what just happened, they were crying because it was a dream that came true for them.
On our second dive the action was for the mantas, we spent most of the dive on the 80ft/24m cleaning station looking at 3 mantas, 2 chevron and a black manta, getting cleaned for 12 clarion angel fish, they would come and go come and go while we were just holding on to the rocks to avoid fighting the current and again listening to the humpback whales sing, they were so loud at times that we really thought that we would see them but that didn't happen =(.

For the third dive we had to only go down the descent line, kick a few meters away from it and right there we had a very very friendly chevron manta that stay with us the whole dive, it would go from one diver to the next one looking for our bubbles, it would get so much bubbles that it would sneeze from time to time, but after that it wanted more, so it kept us all entertained for about 50 minutes! Just amazing to play with this ocean giants!

On our last dive we had some more manta action and a very very very loud humpback singing, so loud that we even went into the blue looking for it, but we had no luck, but  anyway we enjoyed the singing!

Now we are leaving Socorro island and heading back to San Benedicto where we will have our last day of diving of this trip, so stay tuned!

Hasta la vista!

Antonio Romero
Dive Instructor

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