Diving in Cabo Pulmo, Mexico is Spectacular!

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By Rick Harbeck 

Diving in Mexico has been enjoyed by millions of divers over the past few years.  

Dive enthusiast from around the world have been travelling to Mexico with dive groups, dive clubs and dive buddies just to experience the warm, clear oceans off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and the island of Cozumel.  

These dive particular destinations have been visited so many times by the same divers that they seem to be losing their appeal.  Dive store owners and dive club operators are now searching to experience new dive destinations to keep their members and customers from jumping ship.  The challenge is how to find world class diving close to home, reasonably priced and exciting for all levels of divers.

There's a not so new dive destination here in Mexico that is just starting to catch on......... CABO PULMO! World class, reasonably priced exciting diving in Baja Mexico. 

It's a far cry from the concrete jungle of Cancun, or the cold water sink holes in Tulum that some call cenotes.  

Cabo Pulmo is a hidden treasure located just one hour from the Los Cabos Airport. A place that is home to 100 residents (1/2 of them Mexican. the other 1/2 Gringo), a dirt road runs thru it, as does the Baja 500.  There are 6 restaurants, no grocery stores, no gas stations, no power lines and no ATM machines.  Oddly enough, there are 5 well maintained tennis courts, miles & miles of bike and hike trails and some of the best food on the planet.  

But the coolest thing is the DIVING!!!  It's equal to or better than any other dive destination in Mexico.  It is in a class of diving all by itself.  

There are more fish, bigger fish, more schools of fish, bigger schools of fish, more species of fish, bigger species, whales, rays, mantas, moray eels (swimming in the open), sharks, dolphins, orcas, sea lions, nudibranchs, coral, I can go on and on....  So much bio mass that Jacques Cousteau called Cabo Pulmo "The Aquarium of the World".

If someone would have told me 10 years ago that Jacques had said that about a place so close to home, I would have been coming here every couple of months to do some diving!  And Cabo Pulmo does get a tremendous amount of business from people who do just that.

Dive Cabo Pulmo is an amazing deal.  Come for a long weekend, summer's almost here.   It's a great place for family diving, old friends to reunite, and a FUN place stay and play.

Cabo Pulmo is offering 50% off EVERYTHING during May & June.  It's worth the trip.  Cabo Pulmo is a vortex...If you go once, you will return again and again.

Make those plans now. 

Visit the website at www.cabopulmo.com

Source: http://www.cabopulmo.com/blog-cabo-pulmo-baja-sur-california/bid/141118/Diving-in-Cabo-Pulmo-Mexico-is-Spectacular

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Cabo Pulmo's fight to save "The World's Aquarium"

Cabo Pulmo, a remote knob of classic Baja landscape with an underwater world singularly blessed by nature, slumbered for decades on the peninsula's East Cape. It rarely made a blip on the tourism radar except for avid fishermen, divers, and in more recent years, windsurfers and adventurous tourists from Los Cabos, about an hour's drive away. Despite a valiant, and successful, effort by Cabo Pulmo's residents and fans to get the federal government to protect its uniquely rich waters as a marine national park in 1995, today it is the target of massive development that would plant 30,000 hotel rooms — equivalent to another Cancun — on the sand dunes, along with a marina for 490 boats, shopping centers and two golf courses.

You don't have to be a math savant to figure out that the area, which now has only about 80 scattered residents, will be irrevocably changed. Not only will the wild, frontier-like atmosphere be replaced with the crowds and bustle of another mega-resort, by most scientific assessments a unique ocean ecosystem will be destroyed.

The only coral reef in the Gulf of California, at an estimated 20,000 years one of the oldest on North America's Pacific coast, lies off of Cabo Pulmo's shore. Parts of the shallow coral mountain lie just 10 miles offshore, sheltering 226 fish species. In addition to sea turtles, dolphins, tiger and bull sharks, and migrating humpback and blue whales, Cabo Pulmo is one of the few spots in the Americas where rare whale sharks — the largest fish alive — congregate near land.

Despite Cabo Pulmo's remoteness and relative obscurity, locals began seeing fewer fish in the 1990s, while those there were had retreated farther out into the ocean. Primarily because of commercial fishing boats' practice of dragging their anchors through the coral to snag the valuable fish species, what had once been dubbed "the world's aquarium" by pioneering diver Jacques Cousteau was increasingly barren of life.
Alarm over the reef's degradation led to the campaign that turned Cabo Pulmo's waters into a 17,560-acre marine reserve, which prohibited fishing. Local residents shifted much of their economy from fishing to ecotourism. Slowly, the reef recovered. Cabo Pulmo was designated a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site in 2005 and was added to the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance in 2008.

The efforts have paid off: A study released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in August 2011 found Cabo Pulmo's "biomass" — total weight of living species — increased by 463 percent from 1999 to 2009. The report credited the park's success largely to enforcement of protective regulations by local boat captains, dive masters and other locals.
Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, one of the report's authors, wrote in a Scripps article about the study, "No other marine reserve in the world has shown such a fish recovery." Residents have noticed an increase in the number of fish, including a monumental spike in the number of sharks. Some species are migrating from other areas to the now-healthy reef.

In February of this year, the Mexican Senate's Natural Resources, Environmental Protection and Fishing Commission trumpeted Capo Pulmo as one of Mexico's most successful conservations efforts in a photo exhibit in Mexico City titled "Successes of Conservation." There's no question the pride is justified; the irony is that Mexico's Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) had already set Cabo Pulmo's destruction in motion by approving the environmental impact statement in 2008 for the initial stage of the Cabo Cortes mega-resort proposed by Spanish developer Hansa Urbana.

Federal environmental officials did impose stricter environmental conditions while green-lighting Environmentalists, backed by scientists from Mexico and around the world, brought Cabo Pulmo's plight to UNESCO's attention last May. The alerts brought representatives of UNESCO, the Ramsar Convention and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to Cabo Pulmo in November to evaluate the potential impact of Cabo Cortes and to hear from both the affected communities and the developer. The organizations called for Cabo Pulmo to be added to UNESCO's "World Heritage in Danger" list and the Montreux Register under the Ramsar Convention as a wetland in danger.

Environmentalists, backed by scientists from Mexico and around the world, brought Cabo Pulmo's plight to UNESCO's attention last May. The alerts brought representatives of UNESCO, the Ramsar Convention and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to Cabo Pulmo in November to evaluate the potential impact of Cabo Cortes and to hear from both the affected communities and the developer. The organizations called for Cabo Pulmo to be added to UNESCO's "World Heritage in Danger" list and the Montreux Register under the Ramsar Convention as a wetland in danger.

The 2009 abandonment of the once-ballyhooed "Escalera Nautica" project, which aimed to create a route of marinas and tourist sites up and down the Baja peninsula, and the sputtering, three-decade history of the still-unrealized Loreto Bay project, would seem to argue against the Cabo Pulmo development on financial as well as environmental grounds.

Despite the runaway-train speed of large-scale tourism development in Mexico, Cabo Pulmo is not lost yet. SEMARNAT ruled last August that the 2008 environmental permit it granted for Cabo Cortes no longer is valid, and that it would review that decision.

Some heavy hitters are beating the drum for outright cancelation this time around, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance; Jean-Michel Cousteau, the legendary marine biologist's eldest son and president of the Ocean Futures Society; Greenpeace; the World Wildlife Fund; and Mexican movie and TV stars.
To learn more about the effort to stop development at Cabo Pulmo, go to the Wildcoast website. The international conservation organization, which works in the Californias and Latin America, offers volunteer opportunities and is collecting petition signatures.
This article has been updated since it first appeared online.

Former Chronicle travel editor Christine Delsol is the author of "Pauline Frommer's Cancún & the Yucatán" and a regular contributor to "Frommer's Mexico" and "Frommer's Cancún & the Yucatán."

Photo: Cabo Amazing
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/03/28/mexico_mix_cabo_pulmo.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1rMnWhXZw

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Photo Exhibit “Successes of Mexican Conservation” in the Federal Congress

From: http://www.wildcoast.net/media-center/news/177-photo-exhibit-successes-of-mexican-conservation-in-the-federal-congress

Photo Exhibit Highlights Cabo Pulmo

On Tuesday March 29th, WiLDCOAST, Cabopulmovivo alliance, iLCP, and the Mexican Congress, hosted the photo exhibit “Successes of Mexican Conservation,” highlighting the great success story that is Cabo Pulmo in Baja California Sur. After the opening of the exhibit, 21 Mexican Legislators participated in a press conference and agreed to pressure SEMARNAT to revoke permission to build the mega development of Cabo Cortes. A “point of agreement” will be signed to this effect on Tuesday April 5th. Also in attendance was Dr. Octavio Aburto, Photographer and marine biologist of Scripps Institute of Oceanography , in San Diego, Judith Castro, from Cabo Pulmo, she is the president of the community organization Amigos para la Conservación de Cabo Pulmo, Fay Crevoshay, director of Communications of WiLDCOAST, and El Hijo del Santo, spokesperson of WiLDCOAST and a defender of the ocean. El Hijo del Santo attended the event to ask the legislators to protect Cabo Pulmo from this mega development that would destroy the reef. This exhibition was comprised of 25 photographs of marine and terrestrial areas that are important for conservation, which are located in the Baja California Peninsula and Sea of Cortes. The photographers Ralph Lee Hopkins and Octavio Aburto are part of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). Special thanks to Dip. Guillermo Cueva Sada, his staff, Giovanni Torres, at the Chamber of Deputies, and the Green Ecological Party of Mexico for hosting this event.

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