Here's the news from our second day at Roca Partida!
We started the first dive at 8:30am, with the same conditions as yesterday, 26C/79F and a beautiful crystal clear visibility of 100’/30 m plus!
Our initial plan was to look for the school of hammerheads that we had seen yesterday, but this time we really wanted to see them up close, so we really put an effort in the quest finding of these beautiful sharks! Previously knowing that the sharks were possible going to be in the south east side of Roca, as soon as we reached 100’/30 m we immediately saw some glimpses of them at 130/40m at least, we approached to them carefully and patiently because we didn’t really want to miss the opportunity of seeing them right up to our faces, so the idea was not to scare them, anyway, luckily for us they turned to our way and an started coming up shallower and towards us, this time they really gave us really good close-up passes to everyone before heading back down deep and vanishing into the deep blue. Time to come back to the rock and see what this amazing pinnacle had for us today. On the way back to the south corner, we spotted finally a huge school of bonitos that were being chased by some Silky Sharks, we tried to keep up with them but were swimming way too fast. When all these tuna relatives passed by, behind them a pod of eight bottlenose dolphins showed up and hung out with us for the last 20 minutes of the dive. During our safety stop we spotted the unusual visit of our friendly female sea lion that rested calmly on the surface. By the way, this Sea Lion has been hanging at Roca Partida for the last 4 months. The closest point form here where there sea lions is Cabo San Lucas; so this sea lion has made a long way away from home to be here, who knows what reasons brought him up to here?
We got picked up by our panga driver “Crazy” Luis and took us back to the SolmarV, on the way there we saw several blows of few humpback whales here and there. The other divers were on the other panga were close to some of the whales and didn’t miss the opportunity to get in the water so they all jumped back to the water and saw a momma humpback, her calf and an escort together with the same dolphins we had previously seen in the beginning of the dive.
On the second dive, the three group of divers leaded by Danny, Nacho, and myself, we all went off the rock in the blue to look for hammerheads one more time, however, this time the sharks were way to deep, well beyond our maximum depth. We gave up and didn’t keep wasting time at deep, we returned to the rock and to our surprised a 14’/4 m juvenile whale sharks was swimming up from the deep and went all the way up to the surface! Basically all divers hung out with him for the rest of the dive! Everyone had incredible opportunities to video and photograph this baby gentle giant!
The third dive was quieter; the visibility had got a bit murky later on so we decided to spend the dive hanging at the pockets were all the piles of white tip reef sharks are, we were really hoping we could see the same friendly whale shark again, however we weren’t so lucky this time to catch a second sight of him. We did see galapagos and silvertip sharks here and there and a few couple hundred pound yellow fin tunas that cruised by looking for some fish to catch! Well folks, these were today’s news from Roca Partida. Tonight we’re leaving this epic rock and going to Socorro Island. We’re looking forward to seeing more dolphin interaction at the capital of the friendly dolphins and of course to seeing also the majestic flying carpets getting cleaning at the best manta cleaning station in the archipelago….Cabo Pearce!
Thanks for tuning in, nos vemos en la próxima!
Erick Higuera
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