As a child, I often dreamed of being able to breathe underwater. I could never hold my breath for much longer than a minute nor could I swim down as far as I wanted to. In my teenage years, I moved away from Los Cabos for nearly 14 years and returned to a very different touristic destination. In time I made new friends and started exploring water sports I hadn’t tried before. Diving was one of them.
Working up the courage to go diving for the first time was nerve-wrecking. Of course I knew I would not drown, since I was only 15 feet underwater, so I could easily swim up to the surface. I was perfectly aware that I could breathe freely with the regulator. And yet, I felt claustrophobic. Luckily, I got distracted with the first shoal of fish that crossed my line of vision, and before I realized it, I was breathing regularly and floating about. Diving has become one of my favorite pastimes. I try to do it as often as I can, which is not often enough. Baja California Sur is a diver’s paradise – from the migrating schools of mobulas along the coast of Los Cabos, the sand cascades near The Arch, the schools of jack’s and congregation of bull sharks at Cabo Pulmo, exploring wreckages, night diving and more.
Not that I’ve gone diving in many places around the globe, but of the few places I have gone, the Arch is my favorite one. No two dives have ever been the same. From being able to watch entire schools of mobulas to small reef sharks, eels, turtles, seahorses and a vast diversity of fish, every immersion has been different. But it is not all fun and games. The increased activity in the bay has led to an escalation of pollution. With each dive, we collect more and more rubbish from the seabed. As often as I can, I accompany a group of local passionate divers with the aim of cleaning bit by bit the seabed, once a month this group gets together to tackle a section of the bay.
Even though I have always been well aware of the growing pollution problem, it is something totally different when you witness firsthand what lies beneath the apparently clean surface. It would be a great thing if we could all do our part to keep this beautiful diving destination completely garbage-free by properly disposing of waste (or even eliminating it altogether), by watching our own actions and encouraging others to do the same.
Photo by Andromeda Alghieri. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bydn3CmgPHQ/
