Today was a mantastic day of diving at the Boiler!

May 30, 2015
San Benedicto Island
Today was a great day of diving at the Boiler!  Before we entered the water we had bottlenose dolphins jumping in the water, inviting us to play with them! We followed the descent line all the way down when the first bottlenose were heading in our direction!  We headed towards the eastern corner when the first chevron manta of the day appeared to the east in 60ft/18m of water!  It moved up to 50ft/15m when another chevron manta joined the show! The pacific giant mantas were patrolling the area swimming circles around the cleaning station where the clarion angelfish are waiting for them!  The dive was very relaxing and enjoyable with all of the mantas playing between 50ft/15m and 70ft 21m for the entire dive!
For the second dive, the visibility was pretty clear between 60ft to 80ft, water temp was 76F/24C to 78F/25C for the rest of the day! 
On the second dive we reach 90 ft/27 m and we opened from the Boiler to the Pinnacle in front, we turned around the rock formation, which was plenty of tropical fish! We saw moorish idols, trumpet fish and a school of grunts.  On the way back to the Boiler we found two chevron mantas, and the only thing we needed to do was just stay there and wait for more Mantas to come! Eventually, we had four Mantas, close to the step that the Boiler has at the 50 ft./15 m. From the Boiler to the northern area of the dive site, out in the blue the Mantas were very kind to divers and they really like to feel the divers bubbles on their bellies!  We decided to change direction and we moved from the eastern to the western corner. Once there we saw a group of bottlenose dolphins swimming straight towards us!  They seemed very curious about us and very playful as well. They’ve been swimming up and down, when they were ready to leave, one of them come back to us wanted to take another look at us. We followed them until they disappeared into the immensity of the blue. We continued to the northern point, when the first black manta appeared from the depths and immediately a chevron manta joined us! We followed the wall of the boiler and when you pay attention to small details, you can see lot of sea life, such as Panamic green moray eels, white tip sharks, beautiful hard coral, Pacific triggerfish, lobsters, leather bass, and of course the beautiful rock formation which looks like an underwater plateau with gradual steps to the ocean bottom. We distinguished a few whitetipsharks at depth ,but today all was about Mantas! The Mantas were all around us; we saw four Mantas, 2 of them Black ones and we could even see them while doing the safety stop! And a curious silky shark stopped by to check what was going on. 
On the 3rd dive is when the manta party begun to pickup, and all we can say that they were everywhere!! We had a group of chevron mantas circling around, dancing in front of us and showing us their bellies! Near the surface they were circling all the way down creating a fascinating spectacle of mother nature!  We can say that every group of divers had their own manta, we had five mantas playing together!  The mantas liked to pass very close to our divers heads looking for bubbles! Everybody was very happy and excited about the previous dive, but when we dove our last dive of the trip it was absolutely astounding!! We had five to six mantas all together swimming all around in the same area. Chevron and black mantas with clarion angelfish on top of them created a beautiful contrast! They opened their wings with magnificence and majesty in all their movements, with all the aspects of the sea life, remoras on top of them, Clarion angel fish cleaning the mantas delightful for photographers. We had all this action with the Mantas and we can say that we we had 10 different Mantas during the day, on the last dive we had 5-6 for the entire 60 minute dive. That’s why the Boiler is well known as a top diving destination in the world! To find the Pacific giant manta over the course of many years, this incredibly dive site is where we dove today and is this dive site where we can't wait to visit again!
Ignacio H. Leyro
Scuba Diving Instructor
Solmar V