The Aquarium of the World

In October 2024, I took a 6-day 5-night liveaboard trip on the Nautilus Gallant Lady to scuba dive the Sea of Cortez. Located in the Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez was dubbed by Jacques Coustea as the Aquarium of the World due to the variety of sea creatures that you can encounter including dolphins, mobula and manta rays, hammerhead sharks, and sea lions!

I flew into Cabo San Lucas from Cancun and met up with my dive buddy, Linda Elliott. We then took a 2 hour bus ride to La Paz where we boarded our home for the next five days. The Nautilus Gallant Lady is one of the smaller Nautilus boats. There where only 10 divers and 6 crew members so it was a smaller small group compared to other liveaboard trips I've been on.

We left the dock around 10 pm and sailed for about 6 hours to our first dive site, Isla San Francisco.

After the morning's general dive briefing, we did our first checkout dive by 9:45 am and immediately, we saw a variety of critters including a variety of eels including the familar green moray eel

and the jewel eel which is endemic to the Sea of Cortez.

The water temperature was nice for this time of year, average of 81 degrees fahrenheit and visibility was wonderful, up to 80 feet at some spots. Here's the devil 😈, Linda, diving in her dive skins as she has "anti-freeze" for blood and can withstand long exposure to temperate waters without a wetsuit.

The highlight for this day's dive was finding an octopus out in the open! This is indeed a rare occurence. She was trying to avoid us paparazzi by hiding in her hole but eventually she got out and I was fortunate to get a shot of her.

Check out the rest of day one's photos. Next blog will be all about the sea lions! 🦭 🦭 🦭.