SWCAMBORNE

Sea lions that is.

Last November Howard and I went diving at Cabo Pulmo with Adriana of Saba Diving and a family from Canada.  The Dad, Michael, was taking underwater photos and I made him promise to send me some.  A month later he did but I missed the email with the link until last week when I was sorting old emails.  There are some great photos and the spectacular video you see above.  Howard is the diver at the beginning of the video and I’m the one at the end.

The other photos are on Flickr Here

The Cabo Trip Story is here

So this is not my final post about the great diving trip to Fiji.  I’m still going to do a post about my trip to the Coral Coast and another one about life and politics in Fiji.  But this is the one with the long promised diving photos:

Rock and I sans regs

A clown fish in an anemone

Some other very beautiful fish

One of the Sharks

The group photo at the awards banquet

On the dive boat

There are more photos on Flickr click here

Thanks to Sean B and Gene B for letting me use their underwater photos.  To see even better underwater photos and videos friend Frank McGinley on Facebook

Other Fiji Posts including the Red Sea Horse

This year the elusive Red Sea Horse was found and photographed by Sean Burke.  Betsy King and Sylvia Burke share the honor as co-discoverers.

The Red Sea Horse sighting in Fiji

The ruse was perfectly created by Simon’s great planting of the horse, Gene B’s excited discovery and Solo the divemaster’s figuring out what was going on and playing along.  Codger Dive Trips are a time when we can all be in 8th grade again

Sunset at Wananavu

The tree in Rakiraki

The Fiji coast from the dive boat

Mike got ill enough to need to go to the clinic in Rakiraki the nearby market town.  There is no tourism industry nearby so I am stuck buying postcards at the resort gift shop.  Not a great selection and more than a dollar (US) each.  The diving is very good and the company is great.

Yesterday we saw a 5′ reef shark and a school of barracuda.  The reef is fascination.  Crinoids and anemones with clown fish are the outstanding residents.  Pictures to follow.

This one is from Bill B. one of the Codger Divers:

“The difference between a magic trick and a miracle is that a magic trick is an illusion and a miracle is a delusion.”

This is a beautiful resort.

Wananavu Resort at sunrise

Ra Divers dive boat

They named the special drink of the day Mr B’s Downfall in my honor.

Underwater photos to follow.

Arriving at the Wananavu Resort.

I sang with the welcome committee.

Many more details to follow.

More to follow.

Howard and I did five dives in the Cabo San Lucas area.  Our dive master, organizer and driver was Adriana Manjarrez a young woman from Mexico City who has set up as a private diving service.  Her Company is  Saba Diving.  Highly recommended!

The first day we did two shore dives at Bahia Santa Maria on the coast between San Jose and Cabo San Lucas.  The water was warm and the visibility was near 100 ft.

See underwater pictures of what we saw.

The second day we drove to Cabo Pulmo, about two hours toward La Paz and did three dives.  All of them were great.  On the first dive we went looking for white tip sharks.  We didn’t see them but we did see a school of Manta Rays.  There were perhaps fifty of them about two feet across all swimming together.  It was awesome.

The second dive was one of the most spectacular dives I have ever had.  We dove with sea lions.  They played near us looked us in the eye and swam so fast it made our heads spin.  A big male examined us carefully and decided that we weren’t a threat so he hung face down in the water and just watched.

I’d love to go back to Cabo Pulmo and spend a few days visiting all of the sites there.  This is the harbor:

and this is one of the restaurants:

More pictures from our trip here

I’ve written four prior posts about the trip Howard and I took to Bahia de Los Angeles and if your a glutton for punishment or really want to learn about this marvelous place you can find links to all of them here.

But not everything I find interesting fits into four neat categories.  These are the other impressions:

Lots of bird.  Especially “endangered” brown pelicans

Beautiful desert-scapes.  This one is La Ventana.  The Window

Roadside Art

Cats in town.

The dive shop

Barone the boat captain caught a yellowtail.

A blue footed booby.  Lots of birds.

Excellent companions.  Barone, Howard and Ricardo

We went on three dives with Ricardo Arce the owner of Ricardo’s Diving Tours.

email: ricardoarcen@hotmail.com

Telephone: 011 52 (200)124-9262

He is a great dive master and I recommend you contact him for your trip to Bahia.

We saw a million (or more) fish

This was not a coral reef but the bay was teeming with life.

Including lots of what we think of as reef fish.

Visibility was about 40 ft

This is a creature that seems to be somewhere between a starfish and a crinoid.  We saw it clinging to the little bits of coral that grow in the bay.

The water was about 80 F most of the time but there were serious thermo-clines where the temperature dropped into the low 70′s.  These are the first underwater photos I have ever taken.  I used an Olympus camera and housing I borrowed from Mark Z.  I wanted it to document that we actually did swim with the whale sharks.  And it worked (see the whale shark blog post)

See all of the Bahia de Los Angeles photos on Flickr

All of my Bahia de Los Angeles posts