Nov 16, 2015
El boiler was the start of a great day of diving that we called the "DOLPHIN BOY
DAY!"
7:00 am and we are already in the water. The surface of the ocean treated us very nice here, lots yellow tail trigger fish were part of our welcome back to El Boiler, and it didn't take long for the mantas to show up, both Black and Chevrons! You can't imagine unless you have been here before, mantas swimming over our heads, circling us over and over, getting very close playing in our bubbles! The bubbles are a big deal here, the more bubbles we have the more friendly the mantas are! They are such gentle swimmers, with powerful wings gliding into the blue as they disappear from our sight! We could hear dolphins clicking and chirping in the distance, but the mantas insist on keeping our attention, so we follow them to the west side, when we see 10-11 dolphins coming up at us from depth! Then on separated from the group to come up to me, letting me pet him, running my hand down from his chin to his body in a vertical position, leaving his belly to be touched more! It was the beginning of another amazing experience! We were at 70ft/21m of water playing with this dolphin, when our dive computers started beeping, telling us we needed to start making our ascent. That's when this friendly dolphin started to do a slow free fall into the depths which he seemingly loves to do! I placed my hands under his pectoral fins as we made our ascent, bringing him up to shallower water to hand deliver him to other divers in our group! How cool is that?! The other 10 dolphins around didn't mind that this boy was being so friendly with us!
During the surface interval we went snorkeling in a bait ball that lasted almost 2 hours!! It was lots of great shark action! About 50 sharks were involved in the bait ball, including silky, dusky, black tips, at least 4 dolphins, yellow fin tunas, rainbow-runners, and more! It's an incredible feeding frenzy where a lot of baby jack fish were the main source of food!
After coming back aboard the boat, we were ready to do our second dive at El Boiler and found no current which makes playing with the mantas a breeze! We found some very friendly giant mantas on this dive! Under the boat three silky sharks were circling below the Solmar V, coming from the feeding frenzy because their tummies looked big, we also had a few baby silver tips during our safety stop!
El Canon was the place for our final dive of the day! We dropped into calm waters with a little bit of current from the west, lots of pacific creolefish in mid water, visibility was lower than usual, but we had fun watching silver tip sharks coming close! At 90'/27m water lobsters and other fish blended in perfectly to the color of the bottom, and green moray eels were coming out of the caves! We decided to swim into the current heading west, we had the opportunity to see a hammerhead swimming along the bottom like looking for something. The rocky area offered shelter to other fish like butterly-fish, grunts, jacks, baber-fish. Then it was time to let go from the current and drift toward East for our safety stop. Suddenly, totally unexpected, coming from our left side only 6'/2m away from us was a 3m tiger shark! Swimming along with us not shy at all, before passing us and swimming into the blue. Pleasant water temp of 82f made us stay in water longer than normal during each dive, to get the most out of every dive!
Dive Inst
Daniel Zapata
Solmar V
:)
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