Monitoring, nurse sharks, carnival and lots and lots of Dolphins - another week at Pta Gruesa

This week marks the first of our fish and coral monitoring dives. It’s great to finally be doing what we have trained so long for and ultimately what we came here to do.

We are all now a lot safer as divers as many people have passed their Rescue Course this week with lots of fun searching, recovering and towing “lost diver” scholars to the boat.

Thankfully they got away with limited bruises when being lifted onto the boats! Divemaster candidates have now also begun their training here at PG.

It has also been a succesful week regarding incidental sightings, including a nervous nurse shark hiding in one of the swim-throughs and a huge green moray swimming out of it’s hole. Also loggerhead and hawksbill turtles, being a bit nosey coming very close to our monitoring transect lines.

Then yesterday the first 2 lucky dive boats of the day snorkelled for a while after the dive with about 30 dolphins, while the rest of the group on base had to make do, a tad disappointed, listening to happy captains informing us that they might be a while to return back to the beach.

We thought our dolphin luck might have been spent for the week, but today the first boats of the day set out on a montoring dive in flat calm conditions. Although successful in coral and fish data collection there was nothing unusual to report on the dives. However, we surfaced to unbelievably excited captains informing us that dolphins were about and had been the whole time we were down. 12 lucky people then got the dolphin experience of a lifetime. Between 15 and 20 Atlantic and Bottlenose dolphins playing, circling, diving, swimming, nudging and bumping us for nearly a whole hour! Absolutely awesome experience and everyone involved was in an elated state of shock for a long while afterwards.

This weekend is the annual carnival in Mahahual and everyone at Punta Gruesa is excited to be taking part. The past few days has seen volunteers being very creative with card, wood, string, lots of papermache and paint to transform the base vehicles into the PG Tiburon and Tortuga floats for the parade through the town.

All in all a fantastic week!

Monitoring, nurse sharks, carnival and lots and lots of Dolphins - another week at Pta Gruesa