Easy cruise this week from Puerto Penasco to Angel de la Guardia and we had clear visibility at Angel Rock for our checkout and weighting dives. Water was warm in the low 80’s and plenty of rays, nudibranchs, morays, and our Cortez damsel fish as well as an abundance of King Angels.
Lolo’s Cove was as fun as ever with plenty of guitar fish, lots of scorpion fish, and morays. Our dive at La Vela enabled us to see turtles and pulpos although the visibility wasn’t as nice as we would have liked.
Our first dives off Sal si Puedes at Andrea’s Pinnacle gave us better visibility and an opportunity to see giant jaw fish, blue-spotted jaw fish, turtles, octopi, and wonderfully blooming black coral with yellow polyps. The Argentines were impressed by our forests of black coral and also curious as why we call a forest of yellow, black. Seems if the coral is brought to the surface it turns black—hence the name black coral. We did our first night dives at the same site and it was great fun for all with the cloudless sky above and clear views of the Milky Way as we surfaced at the end of the dive. Our Argentine guests ensured we were not without music during our trip and we shared music and song through the ship’s speakers throughout the evening…and every night on the trip afterwards.
We dove San Pedro Martir but the visibility was poor so we cut our time their short and went in search of sperm whales on our way to Las Animas. And…we sure found them! We had our best interaction yet and we found a pod of six that seemed tolerant of our presence so we loaded up the pangas and went out for a snorkel with them. We were greeted by hundreds of dolphins on our way out to meet up with the whales. There were dolphins from horizon to horizon…they may have numbered in the thousands! They got in front of and behind the pangas and catapulted into the air---sometimes as much as 2-3 meters out of the water. An amazing display.
The sperm whale snorkel gave us an opportunity to video a mother and calf…we’ll have it on our web site. Wonderful! What a day but it was topped off by a delightfully orange and rose colored sunset that captivated all of us as we continued to watch the dolphins frolic. Our Mexican and Argentine guests thoroughly enjoyed the diving. And we learned about the difference between the Mexican pelicans and huey-huey birds of Argentina.
We’re sure our guests will remember this trip for the rest of their lives as we snorkeled with 6 whale sharks on Friday. All had fun and the crew enjoyed the great cheer brought onboard by our guests. Parting is sad for all but we hope you will return to dive with us again either in the Sea of Cortez or at the Socorro Islands. Until the next time. Farewell from the Rocio Del Mar.
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