Big Animal Ocean Exploration
Orcas, sperm whales, silky sharks, dolphins, mobulas and more!
2-8 of June
On June 2nd we began a Big Animal Ocean Exploration trip with Kelly and her friends. Once again we started the trip off with a bang, as we encountered a pod of sperm whales! We were more than 20 miles off shore and ready to call it a day when captain Juan spotted the first blow, then we saw another and another! The blow of a sperm whale is unmistakable and I leaped with excitement when we saw a mother and her calf swimming together and at least 3 other groups. Sperm whales are a very rare and incredible animal to encounter. The next two days we spent in Cabo, we found silky sharks, large pods of dolphins, small shoals of the large Mobula mobular, mobula munkiana. We decided to chum for sharks and spent more than two hours with silky sharks and mobulas around us in beautiful blue water.
After receiving a report that there were Orcas near La Paz, we headed up there to try our luck. We did not find the Orcas, but we did find a huge bait-ball with up to a thousand dolphins chasing it. We swam with it for hours, until it was eventually taken over by a hungry sea-lion who calmly enjoyed a big meal alongside us.
Luck had evaded us with the Mobulas so we headed down to Cabo again to search for them, and while we found some good shoals the visibility was less than great so on the last day we decided to head north again, this time to La Ventana. Just 20 min after leaving the beach we spotted lots of mobulas jumping, “This is going to be a good shoal” we thought, but were amazed to find a gigantic static shoal of thousands and thousands of mobulas below the surface. They were barely moving, which made for incredible interactions.
A magical experience
Swimming amongst thousands of mobulas.
After spending close to two hours with these Mobula, we got another report, the Orcas were just a few miles from us! We jumped in the boat and headed north. On the way, we also saw a beautiful juvenile humpback whale. The rest of the afternoon was spent swimming with an incredibly interactive pod of orcas, they were playing with a small turtle and one was eating a mobula. These orcas were having so much fun (and so were we.) It was hard to say who was more curious of the groups,, them or us! There could not have been a better way to end this fantastic trip.
