Scuba Diving In Cabo La Paz Mexico With Sea Lions
Cabo San Lucas in the Baja region of Mexico has been a hot tourist area for years. It’s where rock singer Sammy Hagar has a bar. Although there is scuba diving there, I chose to spend minimal time in Cabo and went up to a sleepy, very non-touristy town a few hours north call La Paz instead. This was because I came specifically to dive with sea lions in the Sea of Cortez. There are not many places in the world where you can scuba dive with sea lions in the wild and they were next on my list after the awesome experiences I had scuba diving with manta rays in Hawaii.
I knew that the travel to La Paz was going to be rough and the cost of scuba diving would be at a premium compared to many other dive destinations around the world. So it turns out that not all of Mexico is cheap. But I was willing to put up with the three flights from Toronto to La Paz and spending about 50% more on scuba diving compared to your average dive destination just for this unique opportunity. And I was not disappointed!
There are two sea lion colonies near La Paz with the main one of about 300 sea lions at Isla Islotes, an isolated island about an hour boat ride from La Paz. I did two dives here. The other sea lion colony is smaller at about 100 sea lions at San Rafaelito, a even smaller island about 30 minutes from La Paz. I did one dive at San Rafaelito and it is small enough to actually circumvent the entire island during a dive.
The colony at Isla Islotes is the main attraction in the area for sea lion observers. Boats go out there to watch the sea lions with snorkelling and scuba diving options. It’s usually the younger sea lions who are the most curious with divers as the older ones usually stay in the background just to oversee things.
We were told in advance that the younger sea lions would not hesitate to get right you our faces and maybe even start nibbling at our fins, masks, and anything else that sticks out. Fortunately, I arranged with the scuba diving operator, Trevor Brown of Baja Connections, that we get my dives with the sea lions on video.
Here are the best moments we captured from the Isla Islotes dives and as you can see, the sea lions are like puppies. Ignore the website it lists at the end of the video since this clip was done awhile ago.
We start our dives at Isla Islotes checking out the marine life in the deeper areas before venturing back towards where the sea lions hang out which is only about 15 to 20 feet in depth. As a result, we were able to stay down in the water for about an hour at a time.
After the first dive, we were able to spend additional time snorkelling as our surface interval in between dives. This got us even more time watching the sea lions.
On my final day of diving La Paz, we did the dive around San Rafaelito to check out the smaller sea lion colony. Here, the ones who came around to check us out in the water seemed to be older sea lions and therefore a bit larger than the ones we saw at Isla Islotes. But the encounters we had at Isla Islotes were a bit better as the younger ones came up closer to us. Maybe it was just timing and there were less younger sea lions at San Rafaelito but it was still worthwhile diving there.
Overall, the scuba diving with sea lions at La Paz is definitely world class. I know that there are other places in the world to dive with sea lions like the Galapagos Islands but you have to spend a fortune for those dive trips since they are liveaboard ones. You can also dive with stellar seals off Vancouver Island, BC but only on a seasonal basis and that’s cold water diving. So definitely for any scuba divers (or snorkelers) who want to get sea lion encounters, I would recommend going to La Paz for sure.
There were other dives besides the sea lion dives too and they were okay but not spectacular. The reefs were not very colourful as the terrain was more rocky but fish life was decent at spots as the video below show.
There was also a decent steel shipwreck, the USS Diploma which was totally okay to penetrate. Like in all warm salt water, the only wrecks that still retain shape are the steel ones as wooden wrecks just disintegrate away. Here’s a video of that wreck dive I did.
My secondary reason for coming to La Paz was for the opportunity to see a whale shark since it was a complete miss during my dive trip to Utila and Roatan. Like in Utila, the whale sharks come to the Sea of Cortez only in season and I made sure that I came when it was a good chance to see them. To see whale sharks here, the dive boat must spot them and then try to intersect them. It’s purely snorkelling with them rather than scuba diving because they figure that there’s no time to catch up with them if you have to don scuba gear and then try to catch up to any whale shark in the water. Of course this was different in the Galapagos since the whale sharks down there hung around a certain known area.
So for my final day out in the water, it was purely snorkel gear and patrolling the Sea of Cortez for whale sharks. The day before my whale shark outing, five whale sharks were spotted. But on my day, much of the time spent out in the water came up with zero sightings until about two or three hours later when a small one was spotted. As soon as visual contact was made, the boat sped up to intersect it and I was told to jump into the water fast with my snorkel gear.
It was a juvenile size whale shark but I was not complaining as it was my first one ever (since this was before my Galapagos trip where I saw five). And fortunately, this juvenile whale shark decided to feed in an upright position rather than the usual horizontal swimming position which would have been tough to catch up and stay with it. When whale sharks feed in an upright position, they don’t move around much so we were able to just hang in the water and watch it. Here’s the short clip of my first magical experience with a whale shark.
In addition to the sea lions and whale shark, I also had a very cool encounter with a sea turtle as it didn’t speed off right away from us divers. Here’s this encounter in the clip below.
So overall, my Cabo scuba diving trip was very worthwhile. The reef diving is only so-so average compared to many other dive destinations I’ve been to especially when diving costs are at a premium here. I stayed at a town called San Jose de Cabo after my stay in La Paz since I also wanted to visit Cabo San Lucas, the main tourist town since I’ve never been there. I ended taking a bus to Cabo San Lucas from San Jose and spent a total of 2.5 hours before I had enough of the over commercialization of that town. Back in San Jose, there was scuba diving too so I did two more dives there and it was only very average in my opinion.
But one goes to Cabo, specifically to La Paz for the sea lions and whale sharks. It’s worth venturing up to La Paz just for those magical encounters.
