Monday, February 9, 2015

Some time underwater with mama humpback!

Hello Hello!

Last night we left San Benedicto island and made it all the way out to Roca Partida. The crossing was 9 hours of very smooth seas and this morning we woke up next to the rock ready to go diving and see what the rock had for us!

After breakfast we were outside and spotted a lot of humpback whales all over the area, we could see the spouts everywhere and the hopes of all the divers was to find at least one of them underwater.

Being back at the rock brought also a bunch of mixed feelings, as last time we were here we had the orca attack on the baby humpback, and the question was...will we see whales on our dives again? We knew it was very hard, as there were no calves around, only adult humpbacks, but we did keep our hopes up!

For the first dive we went in the water, visibility was very good, about 70ft/21m and water temperature of 75F/23C, descended on the east side of the rock where we found a lot a lot of fish, creole, jacks, and trigger fish formed a huge cloud that was hard to see through, so we went looking for sharks and at the beginning there was no action, until we swam to the south east corner where we found our sharks! 7 galapagos and 4 silver tip sharks were swimming in circles at about 130ft/40m, so we took a look for a few minutes and then we headed up towards the ledges on the east wall where all those curious white tip reef sharks lay down, but before we got there, as we were ascending a chevron manta came to visit, came swimming from the north and checked us out! Swimming very slowly and gentle right next to us and then disappeared into the blue, so we continued our way to the ledges and man those ledges were full today! There was about 20 sharks on the big ledge at 40ft and other 10 or 12 on the smaller ledges, we stopped, took a lot of pictures, watched them pushing each other to get a better spot, which to be honest is quite funny, and then we swam north, went around to the west and then up to the safety stop.

Once on the panga, while we waited for the rest of the divers to come up, a humpback whale came up to breath very close to us and guess what it was the same humpback whale that had her baby taken away by the orcas! The first thing we did was smile, we knew something good could happen, because it was THAT whale that let us into it's private space twice already and it was also getting quite close to the rock.

Once on the boat we kept an eye on that whale as we were filling tanks and we noticed that was spending quite long periods of time close to the rock on the south end, then going to the north for a short time and coming back to the south. We were also thinking that maybe she is still looking for her baby, which is sad, but also we noticed that she had no escort this time, what could mean that she already mated and might be coming back next year to give birth in our Mexican warm waters at Roca Partida! Either way, we were ready to go again and she was still around, so we got on the pangas, dropped down on the south end and at first the place looked empty, but suddenly we saw our videographer Adil waving like crazy and then we knew what we were about to see, YES! Mama humpback was coming! She was diving down from the surface and it stopped right at the same depth we were around 100ft/30m and she sat there, still, looking at us and inviting us to get a little closer and get those shots we wanted. We could not believe it, that whale is just amazingly friendly! She stayed with us about 20 minutes just sitting there and letting us enjoy her presence, then a black manta came swimming in between the divers kind off trying to get our attention, but yeah right, we had a humpback whale sitting right infront of us, I mean come on! So after trying it went right to the whale and swam on top of it like saying “Well I don't care, I will be in the shots too” Then mama humpback went up to take a breath and we saw how she disappeared slowly into the blue waters of this magic rock that always surprise us!
The manta stayed and entertained us for the rest of the dive, which was great as we drifted a long way off the rock, but who cares!...we saw mama humpback again!

For the third dive of the day mama humpback wet off the rock and this time we enjoyed the presence of few yellow fin tunas, 4 Galapagos sharks and tons of white tip reef sharks to finish another magic day of diving off the Solmar V.

And now at dinner time guess who's the main topic? Yeah, mama humpback!  Divers can not believe what they saw today, everybody is very happy and we are staying another day in Roca, all the other boats are gone and we have all to our selves, so lets hope for mama humpback to be around tomorrow!

Stay tuned!

By the way i think is about time that we name this friendly whale, any ideas?

Hasta la vista!

Antonio Romero
Dive Instructor

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