Dive Report to Roca Partida

Roca Partida
A bit colder this morning than usual. Water temperature also dropped a
few degrees compared to yesterday’s dives at Socorro.

The wind from the north creates swells that hit the front part of the zodiac as
we travel to the rock, so we can really feel water temperature has changed however we know below the surface everything changes!

As we descend we have a great view of Pacific Creole fish, we can hear and feel the chirping of dolphins, they were not very cooperative at first! We also encounter cotton mouth jacks and white tip reef sharks. Yellow fin tunas made an appearance at 21m/70ft depth, just when we are about to move west a hammerhead showed up a bit farther south, then we realized we had a school of about 80 hammerhead sharks. Fantastic!

Silky sharks and dolphins

Mid water and drifting southwest we found all sorts of differing shapes of jellyfish, silky sharks started to show up here and there. Then coming closer, we realized these sharks were chasing something! A big school of striped Bonito! Finally dolphins came, 13 at first, they were as excited to see us as we were to them, we couldn't keep up with their acrobatics and keeping us in the middle, a second group joined us, they wanted more time to play but our tanks are almost empty!

A second and third dive we really enjoyed it since the current increased a
bit more we stayed in the protected area, east! The amount of fish that
gather here has no words to describe, the number of white tips as well, a few
mantas also showed up to stick around for some time, water temp made us feel
cold towards the end of dives 23℃/73℉.

It is 22:00 hrs during night watch we see lots of silky sharks breaking the
surface with dorsal fin around the Solmar V in a feeding frenzy hunting flying fish!

Daniel Zapata, Dive Inst, Solmar V