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I was in your same shoes last year (December 2018). I went on the Nautilus Explorer to Socorro and had pretty much 2 full days before heading out. I was very keen to go to Cabo Pulmo on one of the days and like you didn't want to go on my own in a rental but none of the dive shops in CSL were offering a day trip out there since it wasn't the peak "season" for Pulmo and it is a loooong day of driving and they need at least 4 people to even think about making the trip worthwhile. So I decided to do Gordo Banks as an alternative. Most shops require that you dive somewhere else with them first before they take you to Gordo (I had over a hundred dives at the time with some good experience with depth/currents etc and it still didn't matter - sadly, a father and son died there just a week after I had gone so I can understand the concern for divers' abilities before going on) so I did a 2 tank dive in CSL, including out to the arch where we had some lovely sealion encounters. It was a nice enough warm-up for a long week of diving but not much to write home about and I found the water really cold! (It was around 22 degrees when we went out in mid-December whereas Socorro was more in the 24-26 range at the same time, some thermoclines around 22) We then went out to do a 2 tank dive at Gordo hoping to see some schooling hammerheads. No luck. I don't think we saw much of anything really! Its one of those hit-or-miss type of places.
