Hi folks! Here's the latest news from Isla Guadalupe!
We had a very good day despite a slow start to the morning in the surface cages but we got rewarded for it with a full body jump! And while shark wrangling we noticed seagulls suddenly flying to another direction and landing on the surface, the reason was a predation! We are assuming a baby seal was killed by a great white shark due to little time to be consumed and only 150 yards away from the Solmar V, by the time we got to the area, there was not much left over other than  the stain of blood on the surface of the water! So we continued with shifts in the surface cages and the submersible cage onboard was a blast for divers! We had close encounters with sharks coming up and in from every where, and they were much more active! The water temp was 68F, vis did change from morning to afternoon averaging about 50' deeper than that in the submersible was a little better. We counted 6 different sharks all of which were male as is usual in August.
    Dive Instructor
    Daniel Zapata

Hola everyone on facebook! 


But this time we're saying "Hola" from the Isla Cerralvo in the Sea of Cortez! We did 3 dives today to start the trip, our first one on the south point called Roca Montana, a beautiful shallow dive from 15ft to 35ft of water, we had a surface water temp of 78f, a mild termocline, but the vis was only about 30ft with little bit of surge. After a bouyancy check we all descended on the rope to a depth of 20' explored the area for over an hour finding lots of colorful green and brown coral, octopi, tons of reef fish like moorish idols, juvenile king angel fish, yellowtail surgeonfish, mexican goat fish, groupers, diamond sting ray, scorpion fish etc. It's also a good site for macro pictures, we found nudibranchs like red cross, sedna with the assistance of our marine biologist on board Dave whom is an expert at finding them! Our second and third dive took place on the north point called la Reina! We had so much fun playing with sea lions! We saw moire reef fish, plus some barracuda, green morey eels, jacks, tinsel squirrelfish, porcupine fish, lots of slimy dog, sea tiger, bluye striped sea slug, green jacks. etc. 

Dive Instr Daniel Zapata

Back in San Benedicto after 2 days of epic diving at Roca Partida, "we are going to miss you Roca, you rock!" Our Pelagic Life guests wanted to look for some friendly and majestic Mantas on the last day of the  trip, we started our dive day diving at 7 am in El Cañon, we headed to the cleaning corner in the quest of some schooling hammerhead sharks and some mantas, but no succeed, but guess what, one of the groups were adventurous and found in the blue a school of 20 baby hammers and about 10 silvertips also babies that schooled together, they just could watched them briefly because were kind of shy.

On the way back to the cleaning station a 20 foot black manta was already waiting for some bubbles action, and of course all the divers went crazy and everyone tried their best to get the best pictures and video possible, unfortunately we all were low on air and couldn't stay long with this friendly manta.

On the way to the safety stop we ended up wit the huge school of Bigeye Jacks that always hung out in this dive site and while the people was photographing these fish suddenly a group of 5 Bottlenose Dolphins opened a big hole into the school and started pursuing these jacks, it was great! 

On our second dive here, we did not find anything but a Chevron Manta that apparently wasn't in a good mood and didn't stay with us long.  
We did our last dive of the season in El Boiler expecting to find Mantas, but they weren’t around, we saw a massive school of all kinds of Jacks though, and the visibility was 100’+.

Well my amigos, this is all for the Socorro season, we won't be back until November for some good and hopefully pregnant Whale Shark action, meanwhile we’re going to the Sea of Cortes for our Baja Nature Cruise annual trip!

Stay in touch.

Hasta la vista..
Erick

Roca Partida was great to us this season!

Hey Solmar V Fans

Today was our last visit to Roca Partida for this season. The rock was good to us this visit and we had a ton of fun and good diving.

Today started with a great first dive. The sharks have been most active during the morning. Fortunately, my group was first in the water. As soon as we looked to the blue we saw the big school of silky sharks that has congregated for us here this trip. This school is composed orf 100+ sharks, it's amazing to see the sharks move as a school and not individuals. So we watched as they passed a few times and disappeared. There were many other sharks here as we also saw a school of 10 galapagos sharks with 7 or so silvertip sharks. The school of silkies even came back to take our breath away as we did our safety stop. This coupled with the countless fish in the water column made for an unforgettable dive.

Dives two and three were made up of much of the same amazing recipe. Add some Galapagos, silvertips, hammerheads, white tip reef sharks, schools of huge yellowfin tuna, and 100+ schooling silkies and you have something to remember. Our guests this week will remember Roca Partida as one of the most amazing dives they have ever done. Until next time...

Dave Valencia

Hi all once again from Roca Partida!!

Hi all once again from Roca Partida!!
    Dive Instructors Dave, Eric and Daniel guiding a group of Mexican
divers!!!
    We had an amazing day of diving here in blue water over 70ft vis., water temp from 74F the warmest to 68F below thermocline. We had a minor current all day long from north east, but it was not bad! The 3 dives took place mostly on the north east and east side of the rock right were the current hits the rock, all the action was there! No need to swim! About 25 Galapagos sharks coming back and forth from this point several times during the dives, of course a have to mention those beautiful silver tips doing the same thing as well.  The Galapagos would swim straight at you and turn, other times they were all swimming together in one school about of 30 or 40 of them, but this is not all!! We saw yellow fin tunas in big sizes, it seems that the prefer shallow water because the warm temp! I should not forget to mention so many white tips swimming out in the blue checking us out and coming so close too! AH! Hammer heads too! Not too many but our diver were so happy to see them! So our lucky east side had everything for us today in countless Numbers of black jacks, creolfish, redtail trigger fish, Almaco jacks, cottom mouth jacks etc. Now talking more about sharks, from the first dive to the third one we had silky sharks in big numbers on each dive, over 150 of them easily!! They were patrolling the area in shallow water too! So we were never alone, the very tight school of them that made it difficult to count all of them! The third dive only about 40 silky sharks but all of the above too, really really a great breathtaking day of diving at roca! Dont you think?
    Dive Inst Daniel Zapata

Greetings from Isla San Benedicto! We arrived to the island around 3pm in glorious conditions. The sun was shining, the sea was calm and dolphins welcomed us by bow riding along the Solmar V. We have the "Pelagic Life" group here this week so we're focusing much of our efforts on blue water interactions. So we jumped in the pangas a few miles from the island after spotting some groups of birds. We sped over to the birds diving in the water to find a baitball. This baitball had two striped marlin and a lone bottlenose dolphin. They were feeding on the last remnants of the bait as we arrived. After about 10 minutes, the bait was gone and we jumped on the pangas to look for more. We had some more luck with more baitballs, some with silky sharks, some with only bait, and another with more striped marlin and a sailfish. A good start to the week and not a bad introduction to our pelagic life here at san benedicto.

We still had one check out dive to do and found ourselves at Las Cuevas. The conditions were great with 70 ft. visibility and a surface temperature of 75 degrees (F). There was a ton of fish action in the water: jacks everywhere and even some yellowfin tuna feeding. We spotted a whitetip reef shark swimming around. We also found a skeleton. This skeleton was found by us last week for the first time. It's a false killer whale skeleton and still had meat on it. It must have been there for at least three weeks. It's intact and there naturally so it's a very rare and interesting find. We cruised around the rest of the dive checking out the caves and the many rays that happened to be around today.

A pretty good start to our week of diving the Revillagigedos. Tomorrow we're diving El Canon here and hopefully looking for some more baitball action. Until next time...

Dave Valencia

Our last day on the Solmar V was tremendously unforgettable!

Hola Amigos! 
Our last day on the Solmar V was tremendously unforgettable!

Back in San Benedicto, 7:30 am and already descending in the territories of El Cañón, 4 dolphins welcomed and escorted us all the way down to the anchor and leaded us to the hammerhead sharks cleaning station was, unfortunately the sharks weren’t there but in the blue, we saw the shadows on a distance and decided to go and check it out and of course they were there, a school of 30 or so baby hammerhead sharks were circling around black jacks in 40’ deep, I guess the 64F chilly thermocline was pushing them to stay shallow, above the thermocline. Even that they were kind of shy at least we could enjoy them for and instant before they swam away of us. During the safety stop a Chevron Manta swam by to check us out but didn’t stay long and disappeared in the blue.

During the surface interval while our passengers were having breakfast, we started watching in the horizon how the birds begun to built up the expected feeding dance, they had spotted something, we cheered up the people in going out and check what was going on out there, you never know what may see out there where the birds are going crazy, but we know that always something is going on, well, guess what?, something was really going on this time, we got in the water and this small red snappers that we have been seeing recently, gathered together at 30’ underneath the surface and maybe I don’t know exactly because we couldn’t count them, but there were at least 20 maybe more Sailfishes, few Striped Marlins and Dolphins feeding on this baitball, it was really an striking success, everybody got all excited, we could not believe what we were seeing, there just few places in the planet were this events happen, well here is one of those places, we kept coming in an out of the water for almost 3 hours being part of this mind-blowing moment!

We still have to do the last dive of the trip and the people was happily tired of swimming like crazy trying to keep up with the baitball, so we decided to go back to the Solmar V and do one more dive before to come back home, we did the dive and this time considering the big stuff wasn’t around, we just stayed by the reef taking photos and video of morays, octopi and lobsters that inhabit the crevices of El Cañón.

It couldn’t have been a better way to close this trip with this feeding
frenzy of sailfishes, marlins and dolphins together!

Stand by for video trip report!

Hasta la vista amigos!

Erick