At 4.40am on Saturday 23rd April, I helped eleven other bleary-eyed divers check over 750 kilos of dive gear, camera equipment and personal effects onto a flight to San Jose Cabo at the southern end of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. We did this with some trepidation as our luggage was about to take a journey of several thousand miles via Nassau, Miami and Dallas Fort Worth before finally making its way down to Mexico.
To our relief, everything arrived safely, and the following day we loaded the gear onto yet more transport and drove three hours north across an arid and cactus covered plain to the port of La Paz where we boarded the Nautilus Explorer, a 35-metre custom-built dive vessel that would take us out into the Pacific and the legendary Revillagigedo Islands.
After cruising due south for over 250 miles we arrived at our destination – an isolated volcanic archipelago that is reputed to offer some of the best wildlife encounters in the world. As the sun rose on Monday morning we abandoned our breakfast and stumbled out onto the bows to watch dolphins weaving in front of the boat as we pulled up to our anchorage at San Benedico island. A relative newcomer in geological terms, San Benedico last erupted in 1953 and most of the island is still covered in a thick layer of grey volcanic ash.
We did three dives on the first day. On the second dive I was hanging in the blue watching an impressive school of jacks when I rotated slowly and came face to face with a four metre Manta Ray cruising straight towards me. I’d dreamed of seeing a big Manta up close for many years, but now the moment was here it took a couple of seconds to register what I was actually looking at. Initially all I could see was a big oval mouth about five metres away and closing. The ray passed within a metre of me and then continued on a lazy circuit of our group of divers before making its way back towards me. I didn’t move for the rest of the dive.
The following day we were hanging on the line at five metres completing our safety stop when a sizeable Silky Shark appeared out of the blue and circled us a couple of times. It’s a strange feeling hanging there in the middle of nowhere watching a big shark eyeing you up. As fascinating as it is to see these big animals up close, it’s hard to escape the fact that their primary focus is finding the next meal.
Our next stop was Roca Pardita, an isolated rocky pinnacle in seemingly limitless depths. It’s a magnet for fish life and is so remote that the only existing map of the island was drawn by Captain Vancouver in 1763 as he mapped the coast of western America. At the start of the dive we flipped backwards off the boat to be met by a Manta hovering gracefully just a few metres below the surface. The water was gin-clear and packed with life – great shoals of tuna, jacks and snapper shrouded the rock and we could see Silky Sharks patrolling the depths way beneath us. The pinnacle was small enough for us to be able to complete a full circuit of it during one 45-minute dive but every few metres brought something new… an Oceanic Silver Tip Shark cruising past, a cave full of sleeping White Tips and every now and then another Manta. The highlight was during our safety stop at the end of the dive when we were joined by two of the largest Mantas we had seen. These five metre giants proved to be very inquisitive, and stayed with us until we climbed back aboard the dive boat, elated, exhilarated and with memories that would last a lifetime.