The Gresham's Blog: We go diving in Los Coronados Islands, Mexico!!!

Today we boarded the Ocean Express, a 38' boat with Dive Connections, and headed out for Los Coronados Islands just off the coast of Mexico... it was a 1 hour and 45 minute ride at a pretty good pace (15-20 knots) and the islands are 12 miles south of San Diego. Not exactly sure how far off the coastline they are, but we could not see the coast visually.

Once we arrived at the islands we geared up and jumped in. It was a pretty awesome dive! In some ways it was better than the dives that Brandon experienced in Panama and Puerto Vallarta, MX. In those dives there was more plant-life. On these dives there was less plant-life but a lot more animals. There were these big orange/red fish (they are called Garibaldi) in huge droves, like a dozen or more in one area and they were swarming around us and coming right up to our masks and almost bumping into us and then stopping for a brief moment to look at us and then they would turn and swim away, and another one would approach us and do the same thing. There was millions of these little purple spikey plants all over the bottom of the sea floor... Heather accidentally got stung by one and it left a minor irritation on her arm. Later, on our second dive, we ran into a Sea Lion and he came VERY CLOSE TO US... several times he was close enough to be able to reach out and just touch him! He started showing-off and doing somersaults and twirls for us as he swam, and soon we were doing somersaults for him too... he seemed to be having as great of a time playing with us and we were with him! After a while, though, he swam off and we continued on... we also ran into a really mean looking MORAY EEL!!! Y'know, like the ones from Little Mermaid??? :) Anyways, after looking at him for a while and deciding it best to leave him alone and move on, we spotted our Sea Lion coming back towards us at an amazing speed... only this time he had 3 friends with him! They whizzed past us, turned and started circling us doing all sorts of aquatical acrobatics... we attempted to get photos until we ran out of film and then realized that Heather's air was pretty low and that we should surface. We proceeded to go to the surface and noticed all 4 sea lions following us and they continued to do so as we back-kicked all the way back to the boat... in fact, even as we were removing our gear and climbing back into the boat, we could see the 4 down underneath of us at about 20' depth doing circles around us and twirling and turning like crazy! It was so kewl!!! Definitely a great time! Very few of our photos turned out, unfortunately... we still don't have a good underwater camera and are just using those cheap disposable ones... :( But, a few of them look "OK"...