I am WAY behind on things I want to write about and post here, so I’m going to keep this post short and to the point. In June I went back to San Carlos for some diving, with two of my friends who I went with in April. Here’s a recap, and more importantly, photos.
Day 1: Getting There
The construction on the route from Tucson to San Carlos continues, but each time the drive gets a little smoother. This time, it took us about 6 hours, and that’s with stops for gas, currency exchange, and a bathroom break. We arrived Friday evening around 8, got checked in to a great apartment Cyndi had found on Airbnb, and headed straight to Don Lalo’s for some tacos!
Day 2: Morning dives
Saturday started with an early wake-up so that we could get to El Mar Diving Center and get our tanks when they opened at 7am.
Every other trip I’ve done to San Carlos involved mostly boat diving, but this time we were on a mission to see how cheaply we could do a dive trip there. This meant we were committed to shore diving for the whole trip.
The three of us all have our own equipment, so the only things we needed to rent were tanks and weights. We picked up two tanks each and headed to Lalo’s cove (locally known as Piedras Pintas) to get started. There are a couple other shore diving locations in San Carlos but due to the direction of the winds, we ended up doing all our diving in Lalo’s cove. Still, the two sides of the cove (east and west) are quite different, and there’s enough biodiversity that we saw new things on every dive of the trip.
For dive 1, we spent 71 minutes on the east side of the cove, with a max depth of 35 feet. The water temperatures were much warmer than in April, around 80-81F for every dive. We saw lots of pikeblennies, a juvenile scorpionfish, a finespotted jawfish, and a few different types of puffers.
Juvenile scorpionfish.
Pike blenny peeking out of its hole.
Finespotted jawfish in its hole.
A curious lobeskin puffer.
Dive 2 was again on the east side of the cove, but we went a little further out, finding a max depth of 41 feet in our 66 minute dive. This dive brought a burrowing anemone, hairy ghost shrimp, arrow crabs, and lots of stingrays.
A juvenile green moray peeks out from its hiding place.
Hairy ghost shrimp.
Arrow crab.
Sand bass.
Day 2: Afternoon/Evening Dives
After lunch and a quick nap, we headed back to El Mar to exchange tanks. This time, we picked up three each: two for afternoon dives and one for a night dive.
We started the afternoon dives at 2:30 pm, and this time ventured to the west side of the cove, which had been crowded in the morning but was now empty. We spent an hour at only about 25 feet, but saw several nudibranchs, mexican dancers, an octopus, a ton of beautifully colored Christmas tree worms, and several juvenile highats.
A beautiful white nudibranch – Evelyn’s chromodorid.
Mexican dancer.
Juvenile highhat. They grow into their fins as they mature!
The Christmas tree worms in San Carlos display a wider variety of color than anywhere else I’ve been!
We stayed at the west side for our second dive, where we found eight nudibranchs, including a mating pair, and an absolutely giant scorpionfish. This time, we only ventured to 21 feet – with all the nudis we were seeing, there was no need to go deeper!
A California chromodorid nudibranch takes in the view.
A lizard triplefin blenny looks on as two California chromodorids mate.
Redside blenny blending in well with its surroundings.
Anemones.
We returned to the cove’s east side for our night dive at 8:30 pm, but kept to a relatively shallow 34 feet for the 45 minute dive. Unfortunately I had technical issues with my camera, but Cyndi came to the rescue and captured a beautiful nudibranch and a huge (5-6 inch) warty slug on her camera (see photos below). We also saw a couple shame-faced crabs and eels.
Warty slug. Photo courtesy of Cyndi LaFrese.
An arrow crab protects a Beebe’s anemone from a beautiful nudibranch (I think Bergh’s big aeolid). Photo courtesy of Cyndi LaFrese.
Day 3: Morning Dives and Getting Home
We had another early start, dropping off our used tanks and picking up two full tanks each. Still, we were able to start our fist dive by 8:30 am.
Due to the winds, we had no choice but to return once again to the cove’s east side. This time, we started with a goal of finding out the max depth we could get at that site (it was 44 feet). We were rewarded for our efforts with a visit by a tiger snake eel, a few Lucas’ cleaner shrimp, and more pikeblennies, lobeskin puffers, and scorpionfish.
A blue-eye hermit crab.
Largemouth blenny looking rather large-mouthed.
A lizardfish waits for prey to ambush.
Our final dive was our best, even though we were at the east side of Lalo’s cove for the 6th time in 2 days. It’s amazing how you can dive the same site over and over, even at the same time of year, and still see new things each time. This time, we saw two tiger snake eels, one of which was quite fond of Cyndi and her camera, 2 octopus, and a staghorn coral and hermit crab (this type of hermit crab carries staghorn coral as its house!).
Tiger snake eel foraging for food.
Curious tiger snake eel checking out Cyndi’s camera.
Hermit crab carring a staghorn coral.
A surly octopus guards its lair.
We were out of the water at 11:30, and headed back to our apartment to check out. The total price for my 7 dives was easily under $100 for the tanks and weights. Other costs included $80 for my portion of the apartment rental, and food, gas, and tolls. The trip probably came to about $250 total – not bad for a weekend of diving!
Summary
All in all, we did 7 shore dives in 1.5 days. This is A LOT and we were exhausted. In the future, we’ll probably only cut out one of the Saturday afternoon dives though. A good break Saturday would give us enough rest to enjoy a good afternoon and evening dive.
Next up: I didn’t have it planned at the time, but I made an impromptu solo trip to San Carlos in July. I’ll write that post next! But the next big trip is Lembeh, Indonesia. Wikipedia tells me that Lembeh is “known for its extremely high density of rare and unusual marine life,” and you know I love the weird stuff!
Dives this trip: 7
Total dives: 129
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