Diving Into Paradise : Baja California’s Breathtaking East Cape Region Can Convert an Angler and Make the Converted Fall in Love With the Experience All Over Again

A giant grouper cautiously circles the outer fringes of the reef, barely visible in the blue haze, hovering above the ocean floor like some odd-shaped blimp.

A slithery green eel, secure in its crevice, sticks its rubbery neck out and flaunts a set of powerful jaws and needle-like teeth.

Large parrotfish peck away at coral, stopping every few seconds to look around, and prickly little pufferfish wander slowly and aimlessly through what might as well be outer space.

The divers, mostly beginners using scuba gear for the first time, are in awe to become part of this world. Everything is so serene, so surreal.

So bizarre. . . .

As they push on, a mysterious shadow falls over the reef.

Between them and the surface, 40 feet overhead, thousands of amberjacks have appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, swimming in a tight, circular pattern as if trying to close in on a school of baitfish that isn’t there.

A lone beam of sunlight shines through the middle of the whirling mass of silver.

The fish, all about three feet long, show no fear of the divers who, following the lead of the instructor, overcome their apprehension and swim right into them, arms outstretched, coming close but never quite being able to touch them.

Then, as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared, the amberjacks vanish.

The divers continue wide-eyed, discovering something new with every kick: a lobster scurrying between rocks . . . a sting ray gliding over the sand . . . colorful sea fans swaying in the current.

Finally low on air, they begin their ascent, following their jiggling bubbles to the surface.

Once there, they remove their regulators, grin at each other and speak for the the first time in nearly 40 minutes.

“That was sooo cool,” says Kimberly Fowlkes, a first-time diver whose husband had refused to join her, opting instead to spend the day fishing. “My husband is such a wimp! This is way better than fishing.”

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Better than fishing? Some might disagree.

Baja California’s East Cape region, roughly the 70-mile stretch between La Paz and Los Frailes on the Sea of Cortez, is home to everything from small dorado to giant blue marlin. Some say there is no better all-around fishery in the world.

But there are some who insist there is a much more visual and rewarding experience beneath the surface.

The best diving in Baja, and some of the best in the world, is only a short boat ride away. From June through December, the water averages 78-88 degrees and visibility 50 to 100 feet or more; January through May, the water averages 68-78 degrees and visibility is 30-60 feet.

“You’ve been on top of the water, fishing,” says Mark Rayor, 47, who with his wife Jennifer runs Vista Sea Sport from their Buena Vista home, drumming up business at local resorts. “On a boat you look out and it just looks like water. But you get down underneath there and you can see . . . I mean there is a whole different world down there.”

It is a world the Rayors have only fairly recently discovered, having originally come for the fishing.

Mark, a real estate agent, “semi-retired” and built a house here “and I fished every day.” He married Jennifer, a former hair-dresser, five years ago.

A friend who owned a small dive business introduced them to the many dive spots north and south of here:

--Cabo Pulmo, a living coral reef and one of the most popular areas in Baja, frequented by divers from as far away as Cabo San Lucas and La Paz. Home to all sorts of colorful characters, from tiny damselfish and wrasses to bright yellow grunts to giant snappers and groupers.

Nearby, there is the Colima wreck, a tuna boat that has been sitting on the ocean floor since 1939, inhabited largely by eels and rays; The sea lion colony beneath the cliffs at Los Frailes, affording divers face-to-whiskered face encounters with the playful mammals; and Islotes, a pinnacle thriving with coral and flanked by sea fans, home to eels, reef fish and baitfish, and frequented by marauding schools of jacks.

--El Cardonal, a shallow dive over a vast field of branching corals, in some of the clearest water imaginable.

--The Gordo Banks, a 100-foot-plus dive above a seamount covered with precious black coral and frequented by marlin, tuna, wahoo, hammerhead sharks and, occasionally, the largest fish in the sea, the whale shark.

--Cerralvo Island to the north, featuring caves and crevices that are home to giant jewfish and pargo.

The list goes on.

Rayor was soon converted from fisherman to diver.

He eventually bought the diving business from his friend, he and Jennifer became dive masters and certified instructors, and the two now claim to have the only full-scale diving operation in the East Cape.

And they have been introducing customers--from beginner to advanced--to their underwater paradise since.

“People ask us, ‘Don’t you get tired of diving the same spots?’ And we say no way,” Jennifer says. “Every single day is different.”

There was the time Mark helped save a manta ray that had become tangled in a fisherman’s net:

“We were just getting ready to go and I looked over a guy’s shoulder and here comes this manta ray with a 16-foot wing span, swimming right at us. They have these two feeders that stick out like this [on both sides of their mouths]. One of them was bent over and he just didn’t look right.

“He was coming from a distance and he came right at us, and when he got like 10 feet behind this diver, he turned sideways: It was like he knew I could help him.

“When he turned I could see all this rope and junk hanging off of him. And I swam over and got right up on his back, got my knife out out and there was all this rope, and I didn’t know where to start, so I just grabbed one piece and cut one rope, and I got the right one and it all just slid right off his back.

“His feeders straightened all out and he straightened right out, his wings straightened out. . . . I wanted to go for a ride, but I looked at my divers and thought, ‘I can’t leave these guys, I’m the guide.’ So I let him go.”

Another time, on the same reef in the Cabo Pulmo area, Rayor and his group were visited by a large pod of curious porpoise.

“I’m down there and going along with a couple of divers and we could hear this squeaking noise,” Rayor says. “And I looked back at one of the divers and his eyes were filling his whole mask. They were huge. And I looked out and here come some porpoise at us at full speed.

“They came right up to the edge of the reef and they just stopped right there in the sand and they were like checking us out. And you could hear them talking, eehhheeehhheeeh, like they talk, you know?

“So my diver was all freaked out. I say, ‘Hey man, it’s OK, let’s go.’

“So we went off the edge of the reef into the sand toward them, and they wouldn’t let us touch them. But it was just like playing with dogs. They were circling around us, and they would stop and . . . they’d be on their tails and they’d look around and look at us and they were going eehhheeehhheeeh . . . And then all of a sudden, as quick as they were there, whoosh, they took off.”

*

That was a lot like the amberjacks that greeted the divers during one of the Rayors’ recent “Discover Scuba” classes at Cabo Pulmo.

The Discover Scuba classes are among the Rayors’ most satisfying, because they allow them to introduce new people to scuba diving. They do not need to be certified and must only take a lesson in a pool and pass a short written test before being allowed to dive in the presence of an instructor.

Fowlkes and Amy Watson, both of Laguna Beach, and Lori Rader of Malibu and her cousin, Susan Van Laningham, had little trouble in the pool, learning hand signals to communicate and how to clear their masks underwater.

Still, the apprehension becomes apparent on the faces of most beginners on the way to the reef.

And on the way to Cabo Pulmo, it is especially apparent on Fowlkes, whose previous experience had been with mask and snorkel, and she never really mastered that.

“I don’t even use the snorkel,” she says. “I can’t breath through that thing without sucking water into my lungs, so I just take a breath [above water] and then look down through the mask.”

Within minutes she was sucking in compressed air, 40 feet beneath the surface, staring down the jaws of eels and watching parrotfish chomp on coral, and looking up at a giant school of amberjacks blotting out the sun.

--Vista Sea Sport can be contacted in Mexico at 011-52-114-10031, or through Baja Fishing and Resorts at (800) 368-4334