April 2007 finally brought us our long-anticipated dive trip to Baja California, Mexico. We left Florida on the 18th, arriving in Los Cabos in the afternoon. Well, we got there, but our luggage with all our dive gear and clothes did not. An inauspicious beginning!
We checked in to our hotel in downtown Cabo San Lucas, a small and charming inn decorated with mexican tile and filled with bougainvillea. We went shopping for toothbrushes and toothpaste and had a pleasant dinner with authentic margaritas. Ted had nightmares about our missing bags and was up at first light to see if they had been delivered by the airlines. Amazingly, they had been dropped off at 1:30 am. Maybe the hotel's name - Los Milagros (the miracles) - had something to do with it!
View out our hotel window
We met up with our Blue Moon Diver friends, Jude and Dennis, who had arrived the day before we did. We wandered around and explored booming Cabo San Lucas, doing our best to avoid cruise-boat tourists, souvenir hawkers and persistent mariachis. We tried to cast a blind eye to the rampant commercialism and concentrated instead on the natural beauty of the area.
The next day, we made our way to the Solmar V dive boat in the early afternoon. It is a 112 foot "luxury dive boat." We got checked in, unpacked and met the other divers.
The Solmar V
When we got underway, we had our briefing in the dining salon. The pitching of the boat and close quarters had several of the customers turning a queasy green.
The rough crossing to San Benedicto Island, part of the Revillagigedos archipelago (Socorro Islands), took 24 hours. Much of the time we slept, read, or chatted with the other 17 divers and got our dive gear ready. As we approached San Benedicto, Ted and I were standing at the bow of the ship and saw a dolphin swimming along the hull. It breached repeatedly as if welcoming us. As we neared our mooring site, two manta rays were visible under the surface, their dark shapes gliding slowly along. It was very exciting and promising of the things we would see on our dives!
Solmar V at el Boiler dive site, San Benedicto Island
Our first, "check out," dive was a little murky but we managed to see an electric ray, a moray eel eating a fish, moorish idols, mexican hog fish and clarion angel fish. The next day, we began diving in earnest, usually three to four dives a day. On the first dive, we were greeted by a pod of dolphins that hung around for a while to swim among us. They seemed to have a sense of humor and lots of curiosity! Subsequent dives brought us in view of more dolphins, schooling hammerheads, a variety of other sharks and fish. The most magical sight, of course, was the giant Pacific manta rays! They appeared on almost every dive to soar majestically with the divers. On a few dives, we could hear humpback whales singing their haunting songs. They were near us, but we never saw them during a dive. We could see them blowing and breaching from the boat, and several times we tried unsuccessfully to catch up to them on the dive pangas.
Dolphin comes close for a look
Manta Rays on almost every dive
Ubiquitous boobies
Clarion angelfish
After four days of diving around San Benedicto island, we made the seven hour crossing to Roca Partida. This is a small pinnacle that comes up from the ocean floor in the middle of nowhere. Here again, we were diving among dolphins, hammerhead, galapagos, silver and white tip sharks, and the ever-present manta rays and tantalizing whales breaching nearby. Because the weather was rough, we only stayed at Roca Partida for one day and returned to San Benedicto for one last day of diving.
Sleeping whitetip sharks
Jacks schooling near the pinnacle
A cold and clammy wetsuit is not pleasant on an early morning dive
At the end of the diving day, customers and crew relax
We headed back for Cabo after our last dive. We hadn't gotten very far when we saw a ship on the horizon, the first sign that there were other humans on the planet since we pulled out of Cabo a week earlier. It seemed to be on an intercept course with us. As they drew nearer, we could see that it was a Mexican Navy cruiser. The Solmar was asked to stop and the Navy sent a launch with machine-gun toting sailors over to check our papers and inspect the boat. We must have passed muster since they left after about an hour and a half. We continued on the long crossing back to civilization and the long flight home.
This dive trip was a fantastic experience, we were able to dive in close proximity to such a variety of large ocean creatures. The visibility was poor on some dives, which is not ideal for photography but it did give an eerie presence to the schools of hammerheads and other pelagics as they materialized from the gloom. The cool winds kept the sea rough and surface intervals between dives chilly. A dive trip like this is unpredictable. Last year at this time, the weather was good, the waters were clear, and divers swam with whale sharks and a humpback whale with her baby. The luck of the draw. Still, we were diving in a pristine, unspoiled, isolated part of the Pacific ocean with amazing wildlife...as the Solmar V advertises, "wilderness is the ultimate luxury."
