Maritza and I, just returned from an amazing week at the Revillagigedo Islands, Mexico, also known as Socorro Islands. We were invited by our good buddy Jorge to check out his new boat, the M/V Vortex which is an amazingly beautiful luxury liveaboard, with is part of their pelagic fleet. She is a dream, such a beauty. Anyway, we spent the week diving here. The Revillagigedo Islands, consists of four islands, but we only visited three; San Benedicto, Socorro and the crown jewel, Roca Partida.

Alex next to a plaque placed at the dive site honoring the UNESCO status. And yup, I took that shot… pretty pumped.

The diving at each of the islands was really good, sadly we were only able to spend one day at Roca Partida, due to some bad weather that moved into the area. So we spent most of our time at San Benedicto, which was really good diving, but Roca is such an amazing site. Socorro is known for it’s friendly manta rays, and bottlenose dolphins, as well as lots and lots of sharks. We experienced all of that, including a whale shark, which I have always wanted to see here. No real good photos of that shark, but we captured a lot of decent video clips of it.

Besides the diving, the great thing about these trips are the people you meet and share the adventures with. We had a great group of people that were on the boat and happy to report, made some new lifelong friends. The boat exceeded all our expectations and the diving is … well, it is Socorro and thanks to the new found protection; inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (July 2016), and in November 2017, they were declared a marine reserve and a national park of Mexico - the diving is just getting better and better. I was honored to have Alejandro del Mazo on this trip with us. He was the former head of CONAP and instrumental in Socorro achieving this protection. While we were out there, I recorded a podcast with him to discuss this. I will be starting up a podcast series very soon and looking forward to sharing this chat with you all.

So anyway, here are some of the images I captured of our amazing week at sea. Thanks again to the Vortex and it’s crew and to all our new friends that shared this adventure with us…

All images were captured with natural light, using custom white balance, with a Canon 5D Mark 4, and a Canon 8-15 fisheye, in an Aquatica housing.