Playful mantas at San Benedicto!

DIVE REPORT JAN 19th 2014

We woke up this morning in San Benedicto; the first dive site of the day was “El Cañón”, where we found nice weather conditions, the water temperature around 74ºF, 50 foot visibility and a little bit of current, but nothing bad.  The first island friends to come to say hello were a group of dolphins, one of our guests counted 12 dolphins, but another scuba divers on the other side of the canyon, counted more than 20 and these dolphins were chasing a group of tunas. We continued the dive and once we got close to the bottom, a couple of white tip sharks were waiting for us.  Hidden on the rocks we found two octopuses and a big fat green moray eel swimming around that were ready to be filmed. When we headed back to shallow waters, a giant manta showed up for the amusement of the group staying with us for more than ten minutes! After breakfast we dove again in “El Cañón”, and right at the beginning of the dive some of our guests saw a hammer head shark out in the blue and latter on a white tip shark swimming around and almost at the end the giant manta came back.

For our third immersion we did “El Boiler”. On this dive site we had the same water temperature and visibility, the current here was less than the first dive site. Right at the beginning two giant mantas were swimming around, everybody went crazy with the cameras trying to get the best shot, but remain respectful with the mantas as always. The giant mantas stayed with us for a long time playing with the bubbles of the divers. Other divers saw some white tip sharks resting in one of the rocks, and took some great photos of them. After lunch, we had the last dive of the day on the same site. We went down and around the rock, there were sharks swimming around the rocks, but few people noticed them as we were focused on the playful giant mantas, and had a phenomenal opportunity to take pictures and video. When we finished the loop the first giant manta came to us and after five minutes or so, the second manta showed up. We had plenty of time with them again, so the scuba divers took more video until some of them ran out of batteries on their video cameras!  Everybody were very happy for the first full day of diving, talking about it and watching the videos and pictures before and after a nice dinner made by our excellent chef Tony. Now it's time to rest and recover the energy for the tomorrow’s adventure.

Pablo

DM onboard the Solmar V