Colombia’s diamond in the blue
Most fans of big animal action are familiar with the legendary Galápagos, Cocos, and Socorro dive destinations. All are remote and remarkable. Far fewer people know of — let alone have dived — another open-ocean oasis in the eastern tropical Pacific region: Isla Malpelo.
Colombia’s diamond in the blue has fish schools large enough to eclipse the sun, shivers of sharks and rays, and mind-blowing, high-energy, and often challenging diving. It’s irresistible to experienced waterpeople. Malpelo’s rewards are worth the rigors. As a bonus, you and your shipmates will have the whole wild and woolly place to yourselves. Only one liveaboard is permitted here at a time, guaranteeing room for you and the fish to roam freely.
What’s in a Name?
It took me only one dive — the cruise’s first — to question those who named this imposing rock, likely in the 16th century. Mal pelo means “bad hair” in Spanish. Mucho Pez (“a lot of fish”) or Acuario Fantástico (“fantastic aquarium”) would have been better.
I was stuck in morning traffic on an undersea expressway, with pelican barracudas pointing in one direction and Jordan’s snappers in the other. The schools had merged, enveloping me in the fish jam as they swirled and stopped. Things were backed up pectoral fin to gill cover.
For once I was thrilled to be boxed in and going nowhere. Only when a Galápagos shark cut into the congested mass to scatter the sashimi did my view clear, revealing more than 100 leather bass swarming about, jostling with writhing moray eels in a race to rustle up a breakfast of little fish hidden among the boulders.
This checkout splash at El Arrecife was an all-you-can-see fish soup sort of dive, an experience I thought would be hard to beat in the coming week. There was no mal pelo for hundreds of miles in all directions except the few lonely wisps still atop my head.
Alone in the blue about 310 miles (500 kilometers) west of Colombia’s coast, Isla Malpelo is the tip-top of a submerged mountainous ridge. Its highest domed peak soars 980 feet (299 meters) above sea level, and the island is about 1 mile long at the waterline. These stats are impressive when bobbing in an inflatable boat next to the volcanic monolith and craning your neck skyward. The above-water portion, however, is insignificant compared with the monumental scale of its basalt foundation, which stretches 190 miles (306 kilometers) long and is rooted in the abyss more than 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) below.
Malpelo Island has been likened to a castle rising from the depths. Battalions of fish guardians garrison the undersea battlements ringing this fortress. The shimmering schools had been calling to me for many years, and I finally answered in July 2023.
Satellite Islets and Seamounts
We loaded ourselves into two rigid-hull inflatable boats — with six guests and one guide per boat — three times a day. Diving as a buddy group with all the guests following the leader is the preferred protocol. The liveaboard’s two guides have logged thousands of dives in these dynamic waters, ensuring visitors benefit from their knowledge of the dive sites, ability to read sea conditions, predictions of marine life locations, and interpretations of fish behaviors.
Most of the 20-something dive sites were five to 15 minutes away from the mothership’s anchorage just off Malpelo’s northeastern corner. The nearby Three Musketeers cluster of sea stacks contains stellar dive sites. My favorite was D’Artagnan, where we explored varying terrain, including walls, canyons, ridges, pinnacles, a deep plateau, boulder fields, and a swim-through as we went from the surface down to 115 feet (35 meters).
Thanks to prolific invertebrate growth, rock surfaces were much more colorful than we expected. There were orange cup corals, pink coralline algae, bright sponges, sea stars, and urchins. I spied spiny lobsters, giant hawkfish tattooed like a topographic map, Moorish idols, snappers, a few sharks, and more than a few moray eels. There were quality critters and solid photo opportunities, but they all took a back seat to the jaw-dropping aggregation of bigeye jacks. Imagine Disney World’s iconic Epcot geosphere orbiting you and flashing in the sun. Fascination pulled me to its core. The biomass’s size rivaled Baja’s storied school of jacks at Cabo Pulmo. For the last half hour, we swam alongside, overtop, underneath, and through the vortex of bigeyes.
A group of craggy islets fringes Malpelo’s southern tip. Submerging at La Gringa, we contended with a strong but localized down current, crawling our way laterally along the rock face for about 30 feet (9 meters) until the cascading waterfall subsided. Then we drifted through a cloud of steel pompanos to reach an archway guarded by a resident leather bass.
We logged our first hammerhead shark sighting at 100 feet (30 meters) over El Bajón seamount, where the visibility decreased from 60 to 30 feet (18 to 9 meters). David delivered a frenetic pack of bluefin trevallies and eight or more Galápagos sharks.
WAKE-UP CALL
Malpelo has a well-deserved reputation as demanding and unpredictable. The weather changes in minutes, and sea conditions can overwhelm even expert divers. The dive itineraries depend on strong currents, rough surface conditions, and washing-machine surge, so your schedule will be flexible. Quick, negative entry descents help you avoid being swept off target. Free ascents mean divers should be competent at shooting a surface marker buoy (SMB) from depth.
Our boat loaned each of us a submersible emergency personal locator beacon. The nearest recompression chamber is far away on the mainland, so the crew didn’t allow any decompression diving. Nitrox certification was mandatory, and everyone breathed 32 percent enriched-air nitrox on all dives.
Safety stops provided us with additional opportunities for sighting pelagic surprises. Diver safety was paramount and with good reason. There have been fatalities at Malpelo over the years, and divers have gone missing, but our boat has a perfect safety record during its career. We also lucked out with the weather during our week. The swell was minimal, and the currents manageable, allowing us to dive anywhere we wanted around the main island. We visited 14 different sites, unlike some less fortunate Malpelo cruises that can safely access only a few sites shielded from the ocean’s wrath.
Calm seas invited us into lofty Puerta del Cielo, where we mingled with a school of snappers relaxing in the shadows of a dramatic A-frame passageway decorated with sponges and sea fans. A fist-sized yellow frogfish gripped the wall outside the gate, patiently waiting for an unsuspecting meal to swim by. It tolerated my slow and steady approach to the point that it almost touched my dome port. This dive site and a handful of other spots featuring caverns, tunnels, and other constricted spaces are sometimes off-limits because of dangerous waves.
We made the most of the conditions and leaped at the chance to visit La Ferreteria. This spectacular pinnacle’s highest point is 57 feet below the surface. Fat and happy scorpionfish were abundant on this sheer-sided spire. Some were well camouflaged, blending into a living tapestry of small gorgonians. We could easily spot those that contrasted with the background reef. Moray eels were everywhere, sometimes packed side by side in a crevice like a tangle of evil-looking sock puppets bursting out of a messy drawer. At other times they freely swim over the colorful seascape.
Strategic Location
Eels, scorpionfish, and many other reef fish and invertebrates spend their entire adult lives around Malpelo. Some of the wildlife are itinerant visitors.
Sandro Bessudo, a shark researcher and the founder and director of the Malpelo Foundation, says the island is a strategic location and an important stopover for migratory fauna, including sharks, mantas, and pelagic gamefish. Malpelo is connected ecologically to the distant Galápagos archipelago, Cocos Island, and even the Revillagigedo Islands. The MigraMar network tracks scalloped hammerhead sharks swimming to and from these islands and the shallower waters bordering the Colombia and Panama coasts, where they give birth to their young.
Our best hammerhead sighting occurred at La Nevera along a steep slope with rocks covered in jagged barnacles and pale sea fans. Four waves of sharks passed by in the blue just above the thermocline at 80 feet (24 meters). Each hammerhead group had 20 to 50 animals. Time stood still as I reverently watched my favorite elasmobranchs sinuously glide by. The colder water temperatures and higher thermocline in winter make hammerheads more likely to swim onto the reef to visit shallow cleaning stations. Patient divers who do their best barnacle impersonations get an excellent opportunity for close encounters.
Isla Malpelo is barren, bleak, and severe above water. The eight Colombian military members now stationed here leverage modern technology to stake their claim on this otherwise uninhabitable island — for humans, anyway. Scientists have counted nearly 400 fish species here along with more than 30 shark species, 17 marine mammal species, 50-plus bird species, and abundant invertebrates. Animal life flourishes around this rock speck in the vast, oceanic desert. There are 12 endemic fauna species, including an anole lizard, a land crab, and a barnacle blenny.
For some shark lovers, the elusive smalltooth sand tiger shark (Odontaspis ferox) is the holy grail beneath these waters. Malpelo is one of just a few locations where divers can encounter them. These sharks prefer cold water and usually are far below recreational depths. A few lucky people report seeing them slowly swimming as shallow as 70 feet (21 meters) around the El Monstruo seamount during winter. My odds of success were extremely low in July, but I tried anyway and explored to my depth limit. I struck out.
The dive was far from a bust, however, as we witnessed lots of captivating fish behavior in the shallows. Almaco jacks hunted creolefish, an eagle ray chowed down on a thorny oyster, and king angelfish and barberfish busily performed cleaning duties, removing parasites and bits of dead skin from groupers and leather bass. It’s a win-win symbiotic service. I will return to Malpelo in winter to descend into darkness and shiver as I search for the elusive shark.
A Booby and a Behemoth
Our divemaster showed us another noteworthy seamount while the cooperative conditions persisted. A subsurface buoy and descent line made it easy to reach the top of El Acuario at 88 feet.There was barely a whisper of current on our way down, and I heard the melodious moaning of a humpback whale in the distance.
After finding a flurry of rainbow chubs taking turns rubbing their bodies against a section of reef they had polished smooth, we swam out to fin parallel to a school of mullet snappers and then tacked to intercept a wall of bonitos. Yellowfin tuna sped past, and a wahoo with a wicked grin approached to size me up.
I smiled from ear to ear when I bumped into a juvenile Nazca booby seabird at the dive’s end. While floating at the surface, the youngster seemed enamored with its reflection in my camera housing’s glass dome, repeatedly ducking under to stare wide-eyed into the lens.
It used to be common to encounter large groups of silky sharks — dozens or even hundreds at a time — at El Acuario, especially during late spring and summer. Sadly, their numbers have decreased for the past 10 to 15 years, largely due to illegal fishing. Although Malpelo’s waters have been officially protected since 1995, effective enforcement in the no-take zone is exceedingly difficult. Other species, including hammerheads, are also heavily exploited. It is the same story across the globe: Resources are spread too thin over huge expanses of open ocean. Sharks are cursed by the value of their fins. I did see a silky shark at D’Artagnan to increase my elasmobranch count for this expedition.
The eighth species we saw was the most superlative cartilaginous creature in terms of tonnage. We had just finished a dive on the island’s southwest flank when the radio squawked. We raced to El Bajo del Ancla, praying to the sea gods that we would not be too late to swim in the slipstream of a giant.
We were not. For 30 minutes we snorkeled with one of the most mellow whale sharks I’ve ever met. After feeding on spawn from mating bigeye jacks, it chilled at the surface and made lazy laps around our inflatable boats, unfazed by a dozen humans. For some people, this was their first whale shark encounter, a bucket-list experience extraordinaire never to forget. I shared in their excitement, remembering my first contact with the biggest fish in the sea almost 35 years ago in Baja.
Huffing, puffing, and smiling, I duck-dived down a few feet, raised my camera, and lined up the first of many shots of the beautiful behemoth. Malpelo is not bad at all. Indeed, it is muy bueno.
How To Dive It
Getting there: The Malpelo adventure begins by flying to the airport in Cali, Colombia (CLO). Our liveaboard operator transported us by bus for approximately three hours to the coastal city of Buenaventura, where we boarded our boat. The crossing to Malpelo Island usually takes 30 to 34 hours, depending on sea conditions.
Conditions: There are basically two diving seasons: the cooler, drier winter (January to April) and the warmer, wetter summer (May to December). Water temperatures range from about 60°F (15.6°C) below the thermocline in winter to the low 80s°F (27°C) at the surface in summer. Visibility is usually best in summer, averaging 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 meters), while it drops to 15 to 50 feet (5 to 15 meters) in winter, especially below the thermocline. Strong currents, surge, rough seas, deep profiles, and quickly changing weather make Malpelo an advanced dive destination. Our boat required advanced open-water and nitrox certifications as well as dive accident insurance. Divers should be physically fit, competent in their skills, and focused on safety.
Other information: It is wise to schedule your arrival in Cali at least one day early because there is no way to catch up with the boat or forward delayed luggage if you miss the departure. Remember to bring seasickness medication. A national park fee of approximately $400 for six days of dives is payable in cash on the liveaboard. Image-makers usually find a wide-angle lens to be the best choice at Malpelo. A zoom lens is useful for reaching subjects such as sharks at a distance and for compressing schools of fish. There are macro critters, but it takes a rare discipline to focus on barnacle blennies and other small reef denizens while ignoring the blue and pelagic passersby.
Explore More
See more of Malpelo in this photo gallery.
© Alert Diver — Q2 2024