Four dives at Roca Partida May 30, 2021

Our third day of diving was at Roca Partida, a large rock that breaks the surface and is located all by itself about 74 nautical miles from San Benedicto Island. The crew cruised the boat overnight so that we could start our morning diving there. Here's a surface view of the rock, followed by an underwater view, looking up so you can just make out the rock above the surface as well.

Here's a couple shots of how we boarded the skiffs, we'd be ready to dive with all our gear on except fins which we handed to the divemaster. Then you swung your legs into the skiff and slid on your derrierre down the tube to make room for the next divers:

Roca Partida has a great reputation for sharks, tuna, jacks, wahoo, and sometimes mantas and whale sharks. We had lots of shark and tuna action. There were huge schools of jacks, in fact, yes, I'd say there was a plethora of jacks!:

Roca Partida has "balconies" scooped out of the immense rock structure. White tipped reef sharks love to pile together to nap in them:

One balcony was shared between a pack of lobsters, one quite large, and a pile of White Tip Reef Sharks:

Our divemaster, Juan, found a huge spiny lobster out for a walk. It's body, not including antenna, was about 3 ft long! It was as big as some of the largest I used to catch off Dunedin in the Gulf of Mexico when I was growing up there:

Roca Partida is a huge rock tower, along with the huge schools of jacks, there were frequently several sharks nearby:

Sometimes the Silky Sharks were curious enough to give you a close inspection:

There were also a few beautiful Silver Tip sharks, here's one in front of the rock in the distance and then as it gave me a close pass. The third photo I like, he's passing just under me, because you can see his eye focused on me, looking up.

Roca Partida is well known for its tuna, there is one particularly large Yellowfin Tuna, maybe 200 lbs or so, that made passes on several of our dives:

The Yellowfin was always coming by fast:

On one of our four dives, a large jack was suddenly attacked and devoured by sharks, it instantly created a fortunately short lived feeding frenzy. Just as things were calming down I saw a pack of four excited Silky Sharks coming tearing through the school of jacks, then the turned and came speeding over to me. They came very fast and I had a brief moment of "Well, this could be bad!" but they soon moved on. Here's a sequence of photos from their visit.

Below is a diver's eye view of Roca Partida when you surface nearby at the end of your safety stop. At the end of this excellent, exciting day of fish action the Nautilus Crew decided with Richard Salas to make an overnight, 117 km, 73 mile, cruise to Socorro Island where very encouraging reports of Giant Manta and dolphin encounters were coming from.

ps I also shot many gopro videos at Roca Pardita. Google has changed the methodology for putting links into your blogs from qick, simple, and easy to a mystery wrapped within an engima. You may have to copy and paste this link to see this video or maybe the second (of 47 attempts) will be active and work, TBD. Here's the youtube location: https://youtu.be/xHTvPZqgWe8 . Here's attempting to use one of two incomprehensible, so far, choices for inserting a supposedly ready to click link: https://youtu.be/xHTvPZqgWe8 Here is their second mystery method attempt: https://youtu.be/xHTvPZqgWe8 Here's another video of a large school of jacks, you'll have to copy and paste to view it because of Google's snafu of process embedding links: https://youtu.be/OdxdQdHsIDg