Trip Report November 2023

[DeltaWardog]

Just got here Sunday and did three days of diving before posting. I wanted to see for myself what things looked like after all the discussion lately about how the reefs here are in decline.

Short answer - the bleaching for one particular type of coral is pretty bad. I have never seen anything like it in person, and it's a bit shocking. There are huge areas on some reefs where it looks like it snowed, there's so much white coral. Other reefs seem barely touched, so it's certainly not everywhere, thankfully. Everything else, in terms of fish quantity, pelagic life, the other coral types, etc seems the same as always to my untrained eye. So while I find the bleaching incredibly concerning and sad, I am going to try to write the rest of my report in a positive light. This is not to minimize the terrible climate crisis we are all bearing witness to.

So far in six dives this week I have seen plenty of evidence that life continues as usual for most of the marine life. My count so far is at least 5 hawksbill turtles, two splendid toadfish, two juvenile reef sharks, two sleeping nurse sharks, two green morays, three nudis, and one magnificent, large eagle ray. There was an absolutely monstrous lobster walking around about 50 feet below us today, could be the biggest I've ever seen but hard to tell from that distance. Not to mention Charlie the loggerhead who I got to see munching on a conch shell yesterday. The usual assortment of reef fish seem to be present and in good numbers, and I even saw a fairly large adult grouper hanging out near Cedral Wall today. The two notable absentees so far are seahorses (boo) and lionfish (yay!).

So as far as I can tell (again to my untrained but very concerned eye) the fish and the big life seem to be putting up with the too-warm water. Of course seeing is believing, so here are some pictures and videos I took the last couple days:

Nurse shark havin' a snooze.

The bleaching is pretty bad in some places.

Really half-assing that camouflage today, buddy!

This friendly guy hung out and circled me for a bit. Sizing me up for a snack? He ended up not trying it.

This brave trunkfish was out in the wastelands, doing a solo hunt for lunch. Watching him puff up the sand as he searched was cool.


That's all for now. More posts to come, as I've still got another 12 days here! I'm hoping my video of the big eagle ray cruising by us today turned out well, so look for that soon. For now, adios!

 

[DeltaWardog]

As promised, eagle ray video from Cedral Wall this morning:

 

[PamelaH]

Very informative post - excepting for the 'here' part. Where are you? oops - just looke at where I am. Got here from 'New posts' and didn't pay attention. Thanks for the update!

 

[DeltaWardog]

Time for some restaurant reports! My first trip had to be my favorite taqeria - El Pique is as good as ever. It amazes me that I can get absolutely stuffed with half a dozen tacos and a coke for $10. The gringas, al pastor, arrachera, and pollo tacos were fantastic.

Last night I had dinner with friends at one of the oldest restaurants on the island that I had somehow managed to miss in all my trips here - Pancho's Backyard. It literally started as a small hut at the back of Pancho's house in the 70's, before the waterfront was developed. Today it is an incredibly nice, high class restaurant with wonderful ambiance and a delicious looking menu. I had the enchiladas de mole, and they were gorgeous and delicious, although a bit sweet for my taste. I have been told they like to make mole sauce with chocolate here, which accounts for the difference in taste from the spicier mole I get back home. The restaurant is quiet and not crowded, perfect for conversation with old friends. It's beautifully decorated, with all kinds of plant life everywhere. I thought it was both classy and cozy. Be aware that with the construction going on you have to enter through the gift shop a little further down to the right side of their normal entrance.

And now to the diving. The last couple of days have been great, with cooperative weather and lots of cool sightings. Another visit to Delilah netted three nurse shark sightings plus a couple of turtles. I've seen another two splendid toadfish this week, bringing my total to four over five days of diving! More highlights with photos below.

I got a cool action shot of a large southern stingray breaking cover from his sandy camouflage about 30 feet below me:

I caught this nurse shark snoozing but he didn't like his picture taken and skidaddled after my first shot:

An unperturbed Hawksbill swam right under me looking for his next bite of lunch:

 

[ggunn]

Time for some restaurant reports! My first trip had to be my favorite taqeria - El Pique is as good as ever. It amazes me that I can get absolutely stuffed with half a dozen tacos and a coke for $10. The gringas, al pastor, arrachera, and pollo tacos were fantastic.

Last night I had dinner with friends at one of the oldest restaurants on the island that I had somehow managed to miss in all my trips here - Pancho's Backyard. It literally started as a small hut at the back of Pancho's house in the 70's, before the waterfront was developed. Today it is an incredibly nice, high class restaurant with wonderful ambiance and a delicious looking menu. I had the enchiladas de mole, and they were gorgeous and delicious, although a bit sweet for my taste. I have been told they like to make mole sauce with chocolate here, which accounts for the difference in taste from the spicier mole I get back home. The restaurant is quiet and not crowded, perfect for conversation with old friends. It's beautifully decorated, with all kinds of plant life everywhere. I thought it was both classy and cozy. Be aware that with the construction going on you have to enter through the gift shop a little further down to the right side of their normal entrance.

Pancho's Backyard is one of my faves. The food there is always excellent, and their cream of cilantro soup is a real standout. The building they are in is a converted warehouse, but as you say, it is lovely.

 

[DeltaWardog]

I thought this was a cool view of a squadron of blue chromis (?) around a little coral hill covered in gorgonian sea fans (?) Correct me if I'm wrong on those, my flora and fauna ID skills are not fantastic.

Yes there are still fish in Cozumel

A nice reef collage that shows the bleaching is not too bad in a lot of areas

Plenty o' fish

A big ole' mack daddy crab hanging out with some yellow grunts

 

[DeltaWardog]

Had dinner at El Moro tonight and it was good as ever. Started with a coke and chips & salsa, then I had snapper fillet Veracruz which was very delicious. The garlic bread hit the spot as usual, and a little chocolate ice cream finished off the meal. Total damage - 335 pesos. Well worth it. It was nice to chat with Ray again and find that their business is doing much better than when I was last here 2 years ago, right as the pandemic was starting to wind down. He said they did have a slow period over the summer, but the last few weeks business has been good. The restaurant was a little over half full tonight, one table of locals and every other table obvious scuba divers.

I'll be heading back next week to bring a friend that has never been there, so this isn't the last they've seen of me this trip!

 

[DeltaWardog]

Alright guys, I am absolutely dying to tell you about today's diving. Poseidon was in a good mood today and my dive group was lucky to benefit from his benevolence. I'm going to spill the beans and hope for photo evidence later. My camera is still drying out, so I haven't downloaded to the PC yet, but I hope I have some pictures to back up this tale. Ok now I feel like I'm overselling it and raising expectations too high. Whatever, on the with the story! Keep your photo expectations in check though, it's just a point and shoot.

We did our first dive on Palancar Gardens. The early morning was very cloudy and overcast, and we got a lot of rain last night. Surprisingly the vis was still very good, but because it was the first dive of the day we didn't get the cathedral-window-esque shafts of light that pour onto the Gardens in the afternoon. It was still gorgeous and we had a great time alternating between swim throughs and swimming a short ways out into the deep to turn around and admire the awesome formations from afar. As you probably know, Gardens is not known for its plentiful pelagics, but we did see a nice crab at the start, some lobsters in the swimthroughs, spotted a few nudis here and there, and I even found a teeny tiny red and white cleaner shrimp shrimpy lookin' dude (my amazing fauna ID skills on display again). But towards the end of the dive, out on the sea grass, the big stuff started to show up! We got a southern stingray tilling the sand for tasty morsels, and he let us get very close while he was hunting. Then, two green turtles back to back, with a big ole' barracuda watching them eat. Cool! I snapped a pic of the stingray but had put the camera away before we got to the turtles, so I just admired them and drifted on.

Ok so you're thinking, "Sounds like a pretty standard Cozumel dive". Yep. Dive two was where it got awesome. Buckle up.

During the SI I was talking to two new divers on the boat, a really fun couple from Tulsa. Today meant dives 7 & 8 for them, but they were doing GREAT as new divers. On the first dive they had no problems with air, their buoancy control was actually not bad at all for beginners, they did swimthroughs great, and we were all having a great time. I was telling them about Charlie the loggerhead, who I had seen earlier in the week (see video earlier in thread) and asked if they had seen him. Sadly they had not. This was going to be their last dive of the trip, but I told them they are sure to run into him at some point since I had seen him several times over my trips. (This is called foreshadowing, folks)

For our second dive, we hop on over to Paso de Cedral, doing the Mountains area. First half of the dive was pretty standard - fish, fish, and more fish. I had just done this profile yesterday afternoon and we came up empty on big stuff then, so I was expecting this to be the same experience.

We were about 40 minutes in when I found a brand new black & white do-rag sitting on a sponge, half covered in sand. I plucked it off the reef, shook the sand off, admired the quality of the stitching and the tasteful logo (for another dive op on the island), and stuffed it into my bcd camera pocket on top of the camera, knowing there was not going to be anything else worth photographing for the rest of the dive. (This is called foreshadowing, folks)

And what do you know, right after that we run into Charlie! He's munching away as usual, and since I had just taken video of him earlier in the week I let everyone else get close and get some footage while I just swam over him and said hi. I was so happy that our group got to see him when we had just been talking about him during the SI! How fortuitous! Suddenly the dive had turned cool.

We moved on from Charlie and were coming to the end of our time on this dive. But as we approached the last few parts of the reef before the sandy wasteland started, all hell broke loose. In a good way!

Suddenly there is a 2 foot reef shark swimming RIGHT by us! He was maybe 30 feet away when we spotted him, and just kept coming, not bothered at all by this group of divers. I have seen reef sharks several times but never this close - they usually would start swimming away when my group got within 50 feet or so. This guy just did not care about us. This was awesome! I ripped my bcd camera pocket open and yanked the camera out so I could get pics of this super chill reef shark, and here ends the story of our illustrious do-rag. It's down there somewhere at the north end of Cedral waiting for you, if it's yours. Oops.


So now Mr. Tulsa Goodnewdiver (I'm not using his real name because I didn't ask if I could) is getting great GoPro footage of the reef shark that's 15 feet away from him, when a nurse shark swims right under him in the grass, 3-4 feet under his fins. The rest of us start losing our minds. Mr. Tulsa didn't even see it because he was focused on filming the reef shark, but the rest of us were all gesturing excitedly, not knowing which way to look, and I was laughing my butt off underwater at our good fortune at the end of what was mostly just a simple fishy dive.

The nurse shark swimming away with a reef shark in the far left background:

We eventually turn away from this encounter and run smack into THREE MORE REEF SHARKS. They are literally cruising back and forth between us and another group of divers some 60 feet away on the other side of the sharks' swim lane. They were all super chill and also not bothered by all the people in the water around them, and now I've just completely lost it with happiness. I saw a group of about 8 or 9 juvenile reef sharks on Columbia two years ago, but I never got this close. I'm taking pics like a madman just hoping something will turn out, but I'm barely looking at the camera because I want to soak in this experience. We watch these guys do a couple passes but our dive is pretty much over and it's time to go. Damn! But man, the time we did get was amazing and I was thankful for such an exciting end to my diving day.

Here's my least terrible "click and hope for the best" shot, I managed to get two of them in frame, and you can see the other group of divers in the background.

Turning away I saw a barracuda just hanging out, so I snapped him and got a reef shark in the background as well:

And then, as we move out to the very last part of the reef, ANOTHER nurse shark is lazily swimming away from us, just 15-20 feet away when we noticed it. I'm quite sure he gave me a sly backwards glance, as if to say "And you thought this one was gonna be boring".

WHAT A DAY! I don't get super excited too often in Cozumel anymore because I've seen most of what there is to see down here, but today got me giddy. Thank you to whoever in our dive group is living right so this could happen to us!

That's it for today, I'm going to see if any of the pictures are worth posting and then shove them into this wall of text I just wrote. Adios, amigos!

 

[FLturtle]

Thanks for sharing your excitement. I was lucky to see a group of 5 reef sharks on Cedral back in October. It made me super happy too! Looking forward to your next post.

 

[DeltaWardog]

No mediocre pictures for yesterday's dives, so if that's what you're after you can stop here and ignore the rest of my incoherent rambling.

I did a twilight and a night dive yesterday, and I elected to leave the camera behind and just soak up the experiences. For the first dive we dropped in at 4:30pm so there was plenty of sunlight left to see without dive lights, but I always bring one and it came in handy. About 20 minutes into the dive my trusty light helped me spot a sleeping turtle, head buried in a crevice under a shelf, deep in the twilight shadows. Later our divemaster said they like to do that to brace themselves while they sleep, so they don't get tossed around by current while snoozing. Neat! Shortly after Mr. Sleepyhead I saw a big mostly white Tigertail stretched out, getting ready to look for dinner I assume. His green slug-like cousins would put in several apperances on the night dive we did later.

A few minutes later we came out of a swimthrough and were greeted by two juvenile reef sharks! They didn't get as close as the ones on Cedral Wall the other day, but it was still neat to see them. That brings my total up to I think 8 sighted so far in a week! I'm sure some of them were the same sharks but we're not on a first name basis yet so I can't confirm. The rest of the dive was fairly unremarkable, meaning it was still pretty awesome since it's Cozumel.

For the night dive we dropped in on "Cedral Shallows", which I was told is a combo dive of two reefs. It was quite a nice change from the usual night dives on Paradise, which always have a couple gazillion other divers shining lights everywhere. For this one it was just us, no other boats even around.

The standouts for this dive were some things I just rarely see at all here - a pale electric ray which I'm told can give you a hell of a shock if it wants to, and a slipper lobster trundling along the sand! Slipper lobsters are pretty crazy looking, with a flat head and two luminous bug eyes spaced far apart on that flat head.

We of course saw all the usual suspects for a night dive. A lone, medium-sized octopus put in an appearance and moved around under us for a bit until he got tired of all the lights shining around him and tucked himself into a coral head. Can't say I blame him. Several lobster were out and about, including two that seemed to be having a bit of a tiff. The larger one was chasing the smaller one relentlessly, and occasionally the smaller one would do the backwards "swoosh" maneuver they do to get away from something. He did get cornered in a coral head at one point and I thought we were gonna see a scrap, but the larger one pushed on him a bit then let him out of the corner, and the chase continued.

There were several conch tonguing themselves across the sea floor, and a couple of hermit crabs, including one who was midway up a coral head digging furiously into it for some reason. Never seen that before!

One of the weird things I saw during the dive was a bunch of what looked like tiny but lengthy earthworms, spiraling themselves through the water on their way to... well probably being dinner for something. I have never seen worms swimming around like that so I don't know what was going on, but it was neat to watch.

The thing I always forget about until I do a night dive here is how amazing the night sky looks in Cozumel compared to home. The stars just absolutely pop in a cascade of light that always awes me. It's just like the skies I see camping in the Rocky Mountains in the summer and I spent a good portion of the ride back to the pier just staring up at the sky. Gorgeous.

That's about it for yesterday. Got a couple afternoon dives coming up in 2 hours so I may do a followup post later this afternoon and hopefully have some good visuals to go with my next post. Adios amigos!