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Sept. 6-13, 2003
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 Good Times All in a Day's WorkI dove and had a good time with guides like Luke, Marie and particularly Danny. All of Cortez Club's excellent boat captains are also divemasters, an unusual and comforting thing to find. Your guide one day would be your driver tomorrow or visa versa. As I enjoyed my week in La Paz, I dove 17 dives including most of the popular sites; La Reyna, Los Islotes, Las Reyas, El Corilito, Rocas Lobos and the seamounts of EL Bajo and El Bajalito. A surprise is that the area near La Paz has several good wrecks including the Fang Ming and Lapas Tres freighters, as well as the older Salvatierra ferry. Most had a fair amount of life on them. The service provided by Cortez Club was extremely professional, they were always on time, equipment was in great shape and the diving conducted safely. Once you loaded your gear into a crate the first morning, you never have to touch it again, except to dive with it. It is assembled for you and rinsed every day. You only have to pick up your cleaned and dry wetsuit off the rack each morning. Our dive day started at 8:30 and we were usually off the boat by around 4:45, doing 3 dives a day. Cortez Club is right next to the hotel, so a 5-minute walk from your room to the dock is all it took to board. This is unlike other operations there, which must bus you 30 minutes to a marina. In the evening I would be sitting in the pool sipping a Corona and watching the other operators come back into town for several hours each night. Cortez Club's boats, driven by Merc 225 hp engines, wiz along at 30 miles an hour. The morning rides were about an hour and a half even on these fast boats, but we dove a couple of sites on the way back that seemed to shorten the trip. They are fairly comfortable for their 26' size, with v-bottom fiberglass hulls and bimini tops to shade you from the hot sun. The boats varied in the amounts of divers aboard, usually not more than 6. When we took some snorkelers along to Los Islotes one morning it got a bit crowded. Other times we only had 4 to 6 divers, which was quite comfortable. We witnessed boats only a couple of feet larger than ours with two to three times the amount of divers on-board. One group doing a drift dive at El Bajo was forgotten by their boat crew until we found them on the surface. You get what you pay for. My only minor complaint with Cortez Club was that we got some short fills due to their compressor room being so hot during the summer. Most of the time it wasn't a problem as a lot of the dives are shallow, and when I mentioned it to Luke he was gracious enough to personally make sure I had good fills to do El Bajo. He said that the best idea is to order nitrox for those dives, as he has more control over the fills, not a bad idea for deeper dives anyway. Cortez Club offers full-service PADI 5-star diving and instruction, including technical nitrox, trimix and rebreather diving, as well as the usual scuba rentals. They operate four 6-pack boats and four smaller pangas for diving, as well as a liveaboard called the Marco Polo which does trips of three or more days for groups of six to eight north to less frequented sites like Los Animals. They also operate several boats for sport fishing and free dive spearfishing; world-class in caliber there. Baja has been discovered by the rest of the world, and is crowded with groups from Japan, the UK, South Africa and Europe - all the more reason that Northwest divers should experience it, since it is so close. One day we had a truly international group onboard, with people from six countries represented! I ate a couple of nights with some spearfishermen from Capetown, South Africa. They regaled me with tales of freediving there and in Baja - swimming a hundred feet down to shoot fish. The fresh Red Snapper we enjoyed wasn't too bad either! Continued on page 4 |
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Click on photos to view larger image and caption. Numbers refer to dive log #.
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