A beautiful day El Bajo, a sea mount known for pelagic animals!

Hola Solmar Fans! 
We had another beautiful day in the Sea of Cortez. The sky was clear and the water was warm at 80 degrees F. We were at El Bajo today, a seamount that is known for pelagic animals. We did four dives today and saw hammerheads on almost every dive. Our first dive the hammerheads caught us by surprise as a trio came out of the blue and circled in front of us two times. A third came around for one more look and they went about their day. We drifted around one of the seamounts and spotted a few turtles  and there were a ton of fish. Visibility was around 40-50ft (14m) for all dives. It was a different kind of diving today with strong currents and all our divers rose to the challenge. It was a lot of fun and a nice day of diving. We`re definitely making the best of our time out here in the Sea of Cortez. Gotta go....another amazing sunset in the making!
Until Next Time,
Dave Valencia

La Reina was epic today!

Hola Solmar Fans,
La Reina was epic today! Even though a storm was nearby, we had and incredibly massive school of Scad Jacks that hung out at the spot the whole day. This time of the year is when this fish species likes to hang out at La Reina.  The whole school was being attacked by a group of about 30-40 Pacific Crevalle Jacks and some Skipjack Tunas, the entire event was so impressive that all we did is to pick a boulder to sit on and enjoy the wild amazing event of Nature. Of course, besides this action, we also had some playful Sea Lions and a countless amount of reef fishes.
We're planning to dive El Bajo tomorrow, hopegully we´ll find a lots of Hammerhead Sharks!
Stay tuned,
Erick Higuera

Sea lions, barracuda, morays, and more!

Today we all had a lot of fun doing 4 dives with juvenile sea lions! They were there every single dive starting first one early in the morning last dive of the day! They were all over us with as many as 20 to 30 little ones pulling on your reg hose, your hair, fins, mask, on your hands, they just want to play! Not to mention they have such a  smooth hairy skin, just one dive with them and you want to take one home with you! We did a bit of swimming on our dive and found a good sized  of Mexican barracudas, about one and a half to two ft long, swimming though and underwater arch was also fun! You just take the ride in the surge! We didn't have to swim far to find a giant jaw fish! We saw two other jaw fish and one of them had lots of eggs in it's mouth, so more are on the way!
You have to keep your eyes open and look very closely on the reef to find sea horse and with a little searching a brown one, that we could barely discern because it blends in so well with it's surroundings.  Scorpion fish are also able to blend exceptionally well into their environment, so we were extra careful while looking for them. We took our time to swim around in each dive to see other things like snappers, groupers, green morays, king angel fish, Cortes angel fish and more… every dive was over an hour!  Water temp 82°F, with visibility of over 50'.
What else can I say? We had a great day of diving!
Dive Inst
Daniel Zapata

We're back! Our Socorro season has officially started!

Greetings Solmar V Fans!
Well, this is our first trip of our Socorro season and we had a bit of weather forecasted for the week. The Solmar V headed into the Sea of Cortez and hoping for some great diving. Today was our first day and we ran up to Espiritu Santo Island and did some wreck diving. Our first dive was a nice wreck of more than 100 ft long ex-mexican-military ship. The water temp. was warm at 82 degrees F (27 C) and 40ft (13m) vis. This being our check out dive we took it slow and observed a ton of the sponge growth. Surrounding the wreck were tons of garden eels. Most of us enjoyed doing a few of the swim-thrus and getting in the water for the first time
in a long while. Our Second wreck was the Fang Ming, a large Ferry boat. This wreck had more schools of fish and growth. The highlight, however, were the five turtles that continually swam around the wreck. The turtles were unafraid of divers and were chasing each other around. It was great! Although we were in the Sea Of Cortez, we`re making the best of it and looking forward to more great diving.
Until Next Time,
Dave Valencia

It was a great day to see great whites!

A beautiful day at the island, flat ocean, no wind, sunny, no clouds!! We started the day with one very active shark that showed up at 6:50 am. This large shark was soon joined by his friend, so we decided it was time to get the submersible cage into the water! From then on the  dropped the submersible cage into the water and for the rest of the day it was a blast! Sharks were coming around the submersible from every direction, the excitement inside of the cage was very high!  For the most part we had 3 sharks around the cage, coming from every which way and opening their mouth, showing teeth! We like watching when they come straight up from depth, because it clearly shows their brown and white color distinctive of them before they make their way to the surface cages.  It was funny to see a seal swimming and chasing two white sharks beneath the Solmar V where they like to hide! Water temp was in the high 60's with a vis of 80'+! It was a great day to see great whites! 

Dive Inst
Daniel Zapata

Our day started off slow but picked up by noon!

Even though we anchored in front of an elephant seal colony, the action of the day took a little while to get going.  We spotted our first shark at 6:40 am, and our excited guests were eager to get suited up and into the cages! Before we knew it we had 4 sharks swimming around, for almost 2 hours they were hanging out at 40-50 ft deep, not spending too much time around our surface cages. By noon we had seen 5 different sharks staying deep, and we were happy to recognize two anonymous sharks we met on our last trip! The wind started to get so heavy that we couldn't use the submersible cage, so we decided to change spots.  We anchored at a southern point for the rest of the day where we saw one of the males we had seen in the morning when we anchored off of the elephant seal colony!  Water temp was in the low 70's with 80'+ visibility.

Dive Inst

Daniel Zapata

The girls are starting to arrive at Guadalupe! We had lots of action and 5 different sharks today!

We had a very good day with lots of action counting up to 5 different sharks, we started seeing sharks as as early as 7:00 am and we spotted the first unidentified female, she was about 12ft with a ton of energy.  She exhausted that energy breaching several times, which got everyone excited! 2 Other males joined her and kept us on the edge our seats!  The surface cages were busy with all the activity of the sharks, and the submersible cage was going off.  The female was circling around the submersible cage, up to the surface cages, and then back down around the submersible!  There might have been another female there, that we had trouble identifying, but this is a sign the girls are starting to arrive at Guadalupe! The visibility was great at near 100' until the late afternoon when it started to drop, water temp was 70F (good for a 7mm wet suit) with the air temp at 77F with a very enjoyable southern wind!

Dive Inst
Daniel Zapata