Your dive experience starts at Cabo Private Guide headquarters on the first day. This is where you will meet your guide, fit your equipment, check cert cards and answer any questions you may have for us. We will discuss the logistics of the next 3 days.
Day 1
The first half day of diving is all about acclimatising to the water as well as familiarising yourself with equipment and weights before we show you around some of our favourite dive sites. In the marine reserve and corridor area between May and August we typically see: eagle rays, stingrays, guitar rays, Cortez rays, butterfly rays, bullseye rays and whitetip reef sharks. Your two tank experience will finish in time for lunch.
Day 2
Open water option: Cabo Pulmo National Park is one of the most important reef systems in the area with an incredibly successful fishing ban that has seen fish biomass increase by 450% since 1995. This, in turn, has seen the return of large apex predators such as the famous bull sharks. Because they move around the park throughout the year and because we do not use chum to attract them, it's definitely not guaranteed that we will see them. We CAN certainly ask the park office to dive at the dive site where they have been seen that week and they will allocate us a space if it is available. And no problem if we don't see them! Other attractions include a huge school of cow nose rays that carpet the reef, jack fish tornedos being hunted by dolphins, many species of ray and also the occasional reef shark. Although high season and clearer conditions are Sept - Dec, summer can provide some incredible diving with fewer divers in the park. This means the dive sites tend to stay open for longer as diver quotas take longer to fill.
Advanced Diver Option : Gordo Banks is known for large aggregations of sharks, schools of tuna, humpback whales, mobula rays and more big life only usually found further into the blue. However please note that Gordo Banks is a hit and miss dive. This means that there are absolutely no guarantees of sharks. What we do guarantee is that you will dive with expert crew that will decide the best descent technique based on conditions (whether a free descent/drift style with surface buoy or if they put a line and float onto the rock with deployed surface marker buoy for the ascent). The captain knows where to position you and will do so with expertise but he has no control over currents below the surface. Most of the time we see the rock, but sometimes we are drifting in blue water. In either case we can see many large pelagics animals, or, we might not see much at all.
The last day is a day to off-gas but while not compromising the quality of your wildlife encounter! We partner with a company of shark behaviour experts and biologists. They will take you with them to swim with pelagic sharks anything frmo 5 to 30 miles offshore. It's normal to encounter Mako, Blue (cold water sharks) , Hammerheads and Silkies (warm water sharks) as well as many other mind-blowing oceanic delights such as mobula ray fevers, orcas, whales and more. Not only do you partake in an open ocean adventure shark snorkel, but you are helping us secure and promote shark tourism. Our partner company submit important research to help protect species. If you are a diver that 'doesn't like snorkeling' we can promise you that, when we get a good day, this experience is better than most wildlife encounters we see on scuba! Snorkeling is preferred because you need to get in and out of the water a few times and the bubbles just scare the wildlife away. Don't worry! You don't need to be an athlete, but you should be comfortable in deep water and be able to partake in light swimming for a few minutes at a time.
Nothing in nature is guaranteed! An open mind and some flexibility is needed. But our expert crew are going to make every effort to put you in the best place at the best time to see as much as nature has to offer. Come and join us!
