I have been guiding whale shark trips for 7 seasons now and I have never seen so many as I did yesterday. We were at the departure pier at 7:30 in the rain. The rain turned into an all out thunder/lightning storm that lasted about an hour. After the storms passed the sky opened up and we were off. About 20 miles offshore we found a ton of them! Me and the captain guesstimated around 100+!!! At any given time you had 3-5 around you and probably about 10 or more around the boat at any given time. You really didn’t have to swim. Some were even just hanging vertically gulping the water and plankton. Also looked like a cleaning station for them as well. I used to take people over to Isla Holbox but after doing these trips out of Punta Sam, I will never go back to Holbox to see them…maybe just to visit, but you can not compare the clarity of the water around Isla Holbox with that out of Punta Sam. This was an insane trip!

I had a brother/sister dive team that came to visit me here in Mexico. I took them over to Cozumel to show them the best of what we have in this part of the world. They both had dove on the Great Barrier reef, and both said that the two dives in Coz was some the best diving they had ever seen. I made a video of those dives and here it is….Enjoy!

Me and a fre lance instrucotr that works for me named Roman decided on our day off we would go explore some cenotes that are really way off the beaten path up around Puerto Morrelos. After 4×4ing out into the jungle about 20km, we finally found Zapote’ and Kin Ha. These are two of Puerto’s most seculded and remote cenotes. But they certainly had some interesting geological formations. I saw these stalagmites which looked like upside down mushrooms. These cenotes are offered by us but are a bit more expensive to dive due to the extra distance and time going out into the jungle as well as were and tear on our truck. The road out there was rough to say the least. I have added what little video I shot from the dives. Have a look…

Lukasz from Poland (who lives and works in USA) had been contacting us for about a year trying to get down here to dive. Finally, he was able to swing getting of work and coming down here for a “long weekend”. We dove Playa reefs the first day and then went over to Cozumel the second day…and there we had an absolutely fantastic dive! A super representation of what great Caribbean diving is like. He had lived and dove in the Philippines but was interested to see what we had here. After doing a wall dive in Palancar Gardens, he said that dive alone was worth the trip! Have a look at what we ran into…

Every year we have people that visit us from countries that are pretty much under snow most the winter. This year we had Niklas, Sebastian, and Alex visit us from Sweden and do their PADI Open Water course. They enjoyed it so much they stayed a little longer to complete their PADI Advanced Open Water course. They were naturals from the get go!

Tune in to Fantasea Dive Television, FDTV, and our special beach reports when there’s anything out of the ordinary happening on the beach’s of Playa del Carmen. This month we had a beach restoration project that added alot more beach for our guests to enjoy. Have a look!

It’s that time of year when the bull sharks start coming around. And this year we seem to have more than last year. We at Fantasea Dive make weekly Bull shark dives and have never not had a bull shark around us. We DO NOT feed them but can at this time of the year guarantee them. They average 7-10ft in length and swim just a few feet from us. I usually head down to the bottom faster than the group to lure them away from the divers until they have had time to get to the bottom safely and set up to watch or take pictures. I spiral down to the bottom attracting the sharks. Have a look in this video and you will see a short clip of me kicking off a shark that came too close. Keep in mind that this video was shot while the other divers were making their way down to the bottom. Once they get to the bottom the sharks pretty much know by then that we don’t have food…but they hang around anyway just in case. The second video shows what it’s like to be on the bottom with the sharks. We never take more than 4 divers so the group is small and controlled. Enjoy!

For those of you who may want to visit us and do your Advanced Open water course, we are now offering the U/W Digital Photgraphy Specialty. We provide you the Canon digital camera with housing free of charge. We teach you how to maintain the housing, o rings, white balnace, as well as angling the camera and using the angel of the sunlight and strobe to get better pictures. We also are now offerring the U/W Search and Recovery Specialty. We will teach you various search patterns for finding a lost object then how to recover it to the surface using lift bags. Using lift bags can be very dangerous depending on the size of object so if you’re ever planning on bring something up from the bottom…this would be a good area to have some knowledge in. Both are super fun specialties and hope some of you take advantage of these while you’re doing your Advanced course with us. Come on down and let’s have some fun while you get your AOW certification!

Each year we have folks return and dive with us. Tim and Tommi Mattson and Yan Dumont are three of our yearly visitor we can count on to come down and dive, dive, dive! We always have a fantastic time searching for little critters and sometimes checking out new sites. This year they just happend to time their visit together and we ended up diving both the reefs of Playa and Cozumel. It was Tim’s 50th birthday so him and Tommi came down for his birthday. Yan brought his friend James, which was his first time diving this area. I think we’ll see him coming back down with Yan next year! For their next visit, we wil try to find some new reefs to add to our list of great (private/secret) sites. Either way, we know we’ll have a great time like always! Come on down and you too will have a great diving experience with us…nothing like having the freedom to dive where ever you like with no other divers around and staying down as long as you can!

I was diving with Tim and Tommi Mattson from Wisconsin, off Baracuda reef when all of a sudden we came across this Octopus who had just attacked a large caribbean crab. He first removes the shell enclosing the head of the crab and then trys to walk away with the crab legs and meat of the head. Notice all the little tropical fish around him in the beginning of the video. They are eating little bits of the crab as the octopus seperates the meat from the hard outer shell of the crab.Enjoy!