Joe & Dawn's Most Excellent Adventure

Villa del Palmar. Loreto, Baja Mexico

So far we have had 5 dives including a night dive.  The conditions are OK.  Certainly not the best diving but, like some things in life,  even the worst of it is wonderful.  Visibility is about 30 feet the water temp varies between 75 and 95 and the Marine life is abundant.  We have seen the typical assortment of angle fish, puffers, needle fish, stars and urchins.  There are also moray eels and last night we saw sea cucumbers and an unusual bottom fish  called a guitar fish (Rhinobatidae).  It looks like a cross between a ray and a shark.  The one we spotted was about two feet long and grey in color.
Dawn was a little spooked before the dive but she had suited up and did great.  We stayed down 54 minutes and went to 55.

This was the shallowest dive of the trip.  It's interesting how much deeper we dive these days.   On both of the two tank dives we hit 100+ feet and it was no big deal.  Twenty years ago that would have been huge.  All of our dives have been off Corinado Island North West of Loretto.
The most notable thing about diving here is the dramatic changes in temp.  There must be a serious upwelling from deep water.  The current has been consistently 2 to 4 knots and its like going from a warm bath to an ice chest in the blink of an eye.  Certainly it was warmer near the surface but even at 50 feet you could go around a rock and find the water 20 degrees warmer or colder.
The sea lions were found in groups of 10 or 20.  They were on there backs with their flippers in the air.  I didn't know what I was looking when I saw what appeared to be clumps of black bird wings sticking above the surface.
There is only one serious PADI Dive Shop in Loreto (Dolphin Dice Center) and even they use a panga instead of a big expensive dive boat.  The pricing is about the same as anywhere else.  $120 for a two tank dive and lunch and $65 for a night dive.

Loreto Baja Sur Mexico from Joe Onofrio on Vimeo.

Return to Cozmel...40 Years Later

It's always a good day when you can get in a

two tank dive before lunch.

The last time I was in Cozmel it was twenty two years ago and I was on my honeymoon. It was a Mexican Resort in it's prime. Megatels, boasting five swimming pools and four restaurants were going up at the rate of two or three a year. It was all good, everything was clean and new and everybody was enjoying a measure of prosperity.

We Don't Need No Stinking C card !

I was a man on a mission, and justifiably left my bride in the hotel with a raging case of Monezuma's Revenge to dive on a freshly sunken airliner 200 yards off the beach. Even though I hadn't logged a dive in more than a decade there was no trouble renting a dive rig from an independent business man, sitting in the shade of a palapa hut on the beach. I remember some moron had painted the name "Enola Gay" under the pilot's window by scrubbing the marine scum that was beginning to cover the fuselage with a green patina. The entire area had been declared a marine sanctuary and this desecration was just low class graffiti.




In 1969, I was 13, we had just landed a man on the moon and Lloyd Bridges was on TV every afternoon after school. The entire tourist industry of the island consisted of: 3 dive shops and 2 one story hotels. We would spend the morning spear fishing and cook our catch for lunch. No worries about rising sea temps or damaging the coral. I was immortal and so was everything else.

Oh but how times have changed...The reef is 90 percent dead and there is a MacDonalds where Aqua Safari used to be. I wonder what it will be like when I'm 73?