Before I headed down for my Malpelo winter trip, I contacted my friend and dive colleague Jaime just to see how the last trip was. He mentioned that he had seen the ferox 4 times and that the water was cold! Unusually cold! 15 C (59 F) even in shallow waters. A lot of current and not the greatest viz… They saw a good deal of hammers, though!
Ok, sounds like wintertime in Malpelo… but that cold?
Since I started guiding in Malpelo 16 years ago, I have never used a 7-mm wetsuit. I hesitated, but I decided to bring it with me, plus a 5-mm hooded west.
After picking up our guests in Cali, transferring to Buenaventura and around 30 hours at sea, we arrived at my dear Malpelo.
This was Supposed to be a Malpelo winter trip.
I wrestled into a new 7-mm thick suit with the sun high above me, almost having a heatstroke before I entered the water. Well, it will cool down, I thought… <Splash!> It’s warm! Going down to 30 m (98 ft), the water was still warm! 27 C (81 F) warm! Not 15 C (59 F) as Jaime had said.
I was sweating throughout the whole dive… Damn Jaime, trying to kill me through overheating!
That’s how much the sea and weather conditions in Malpelo can change in just less than two weeks.
It's hammer time!
We had a pretty windy start, with choppy seas from the northeast and a deep swell from the south on the first four days. It made us struggle a bit with gearing up before the dive and getting back into the skiffs at the end of the dive. But underwater, we had pretty clear water and not much of a current for this time of the year.
The usual dive sites like Altar de Virginia, La Cara de Fantasma, and El Monstruo were quite slow when it came to hammerhead sharks. Later in the week, we started getting the hammers. We were meeting up with large groups of hammerheads out in the blue. Hundreds and hundreds of sharks. So many! But just for short moments.
I used my camera only on the last two days, so I didn’t get any images of the schools. It was hard to get close to them, so capturing stills was challenging on this trip. I did manage to film a portion of the group, and I extracted a still from that footage.
The vibrant north and the slow south
At D’Artagnan, the fish life was so rich that the big-eye jacks blocked out the light when they passed over us. We also encountered eagle rays and golden cownose rays.
At La Nevera, we had lots of Galapagos sharks continuously swimming around us. We saw one Galapagos with a stingray barb embedded deep in its cheek. It must have been painful.
Down south, we tried diving La Gringa and El Bajon. We saw a small tiger shark from a distance, but there were no hammerheads or Galapagos sharks. Jacks and leatherbass were there aplenty.
We also checked out Los Gemelos and it was the same. It was slow in the south.
I enjoyed the mornings when we had leatherbass hunting together with moray eels, while bluefin trevallies and amber jacks circle above them. Always impressive!
It really picked up on the last two days. Malpelo showed that there were still lots of hammers; it was just hard to get them on this trip.
The sea was totally flat on the last day, with the warm water slowly starting to mix with the colder upwelling.
Malpelo always shows her many different faces. We had clear blue sky the whole week and many of our happy divers went home with burnt noses and cheeks.
Until July!
Sten
