Snorkeling at Puerto Vallarta's Los Arcos

When I first saw the spotted eagle bat ray floating below me, I thought it might be an errant kite that had drifted far from land and somehow unfolded under water. As it swam closer, I recognized the same graceful swimming motion of its cousins the manta ray and stingray.

I pulled my face out of the water to point out my discovery to Julie, but I saw she was now a hundred feet away from where I was. I could understand why she had turned back, because the waves had swelled a little larger, making it more of a struggle to avoid the craggy rocks to see the fish, which were more sparsely scattered here than closer to where our boat had anchored.

Even with that brief head movement, when I looked back down, I had trouble finding the ray. It had changed direction, and the almost checkerboard like combination of prominent white spots on the gray beast somehow made effective camouflage. I followed him around for as long as I could keep up, but this denizen of the sea had the advantages of being in its natural environment and knowing where it was going.

When I got back on the dive boat, I asked if anyone else had seen this incredible spotted stingray, spreading my arms to indicate size and adding he must have been at least four feet across.

A young woman gave me a rebuking look and said, with the haughty air of someone who would not tolerate exaggerated stories told by a rube, that stingrays didn't grow that large, so it would have had to have been a manta ray, which she didn't think were in the area.

I think the fact that she spoke with such authority threw me off a bit, but after a long pause, I asked Julie, "Weren't those stingrays we swam with in Tahiti four or five feet across?"

"Yes," she said, "you know that. You had one eating out of your hand."

I turned back to the woman, "You're right that manta rays are bigger, and maybe that's what I saw, but at Keauhoa Bay in Kona, the manta rays were enormous, like maybe fifteen feet across."

On the other side of the boat, some of the scuba divers were looking at a chart of local fish, talking about the eels they has found on the sea floor. I took the chart and found what I had seen was a spotted eagle bat ray, or Myliobatis Californica.

Seeing colorful fish is always a thrill, but finding something unusual like a big sea turtle or a ray always gives an extra thrill.

At the first spot our boat anchored by Los Arcos, the water was relatively deep, sort of like the black rock area off Kaanapali Beach in Maui, and the fish were colorful, diverse and plentiful. We had actually signed up for a six hour reef snorkeling tour of Majahuitas but had been herded onto this boat that combined a scuba diving and assorted snorkeling trips. I'm not sure if the weather or some other factor made Majahuitas impossible on this day, but I would guess that Chico's Dive Shop was just saving fuel and manpower. In any case, we were very happy with this spot. By the time we finished shorkeling there, most snorkelers, who had probably signed up for the four hour Los Arcos tour, were done, but the boat anchored again at another outcropping of rocks closer to shore.

The water was less deep, and we found another ecologically diverse cross-section of fish and coral. We saw a little snake eel wriggling across the bottom. We watched a moray eel hiding in the coral. By the time we returned to the boat, we were more than satisfied with our trip.