By Pat Ford
I’ve traveled all over the world, catching fish and taking photographs, but when I’m looking for a new adventure, I call Eli at SDM Diving. Eli grew up in and is still based in San Juan Texas, about 20 minutes from the Mexico border. In his early days he worked in his family’s construction business and rode bulls in rodeos in his spare time. Then one day he got hurt…fractured his pelvis and took 3 months off to heal. During that period of inactivity one of his friends convinced him to get his SCUBA certification, which changed his life. His certification led to a diving vacation in Cozumel where Eli saw his first shark. That encounter led to a trip the Bahamas where he went on an official ‘shark dive’ and it changed his life. He became obsessed with sharks. His research taught him more about sharks than most people could ever imagine and he just couldn’t get enough time in the water with them. In 1999, at age 30, Eli decided to try to make a living setting up tours for photographers that wanted to swim with and photograph/video sharks. He brought groups to Guadeloupe Island for great whites, Isla Mujeres to swim with bull sharks, to Bimini to swim with hammerheads and dolphins, and Tiger Beach to swim with 15’ tiger sharks.
My first trip with Eli was in 2013 to tiger beach. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was getting myself into, but it seemed like an amazing adventure and it most certainly was more than I expected. We left out of Palm Beach, spent a week on a live-aboard dive boat and spent over 4 hours a day under water playing with sharks. On each dive Eli would bring down a bucket of dead fish and the guests would form a circle around him, kneeling on white sand in 30’ of crystal clear water. Lemon sharks and reef sharks would show up immediately and eventually two massive tiger sharks appeared. Eli would literally play with these massive creatures and the photo ops were endless and fantastic.
This trip was so exciting that Hunter Ledbetter and I booked another trip to Bimini to do the same thing with great hammerheads.Again we were on a live-aboard and kneeling in 30’ of water. This time we were surrounded by bull sharks, which admittedly give me the jitters, and several very large hammerheads. It was the same pattern: Eli in the center playing with the sharks and us taking photos. It was interesting to see how relaxed the sharks were. There was no feeding frenzy. They all were relexed and friendly, swimming casually up to Eli to get a free snack. No aggressive behavior whatsoever. The only glitch was that, like the tigers, they seemed to gravitate towards me. On more than one occasion a 500lb plus hammerhead swam right up to me and I had to push it away with my camera…one of the tigers did the same thing and it was a bit unnerving. I was perfectly content to be an observer and didn’t much want any personal interaction, but no harm no foul.
Eli’s shark expeditions expanded to whale sharksin Isla Mujeres, to makos off Cabo, to basking sharks inScotland to Orcas in Norway. I’m really not fond of cold weather much less the thought of jumping into the icy waters of Norway. But Eli continued to expand his warm water trips beyond just sharks. He put together tours to Isla Mujeres to chase sailfish on bait balls in January. I’d done that several times myself but over the years the migration became so irregular that it just wasn’t worth the risk of picking out a week a year in advance and hoping the sails would show up, so he started researching the striped marlin migration in Magdalena Bay, Baja, Mexico. He went to the tiny fishing village of Puerto San Carlos and hooked up with GabinoCarabiea. Together the put together a plan to chase the striped marlin baitballs in pangas and it turned out to be magic.
I first made the trip to Mag Bay in November, 2018 and just returned from my third. Again Hunter and I flew to Cabo San Lucas, drove 5 hours north to Puerto San Carlos and met Eli and the rest of his group at the Hotel Alcatraz. Each morning we would drive to the beach where the locals launched their boats. Gambino has now expanded his operation to include 5 boats, each carrying up to 6 snorkelers. It’s 20 miles from the launch site to the mouth of the bay and the bait balls can be anywhere from 15 to 30 miles farther out into the Pacific. It’s really not hard to locate the marlin concentration…dozens of super-sportfishing boats chug up from Cabo to catch striped marlin. The record for releases on bait in a day is an unbelievable 300 and it’s not unusual to release over50 a day ranging from 75 to 150 lbs each. Find the Cabo boats and you find the marlin. The only problem can be the weather. Almost every morning is calm so the 50 mile run isn’t too bad, but literally every afternoon around 2 pm the wind picks up, sometimes to almost 20 mph. More than once it’s been a brutal 3+ hour run to get home. Some days it just too windy to even try for the marlin, but Gambino usually can find some humpback whales migrating south along the coast which is almost as exciting! This last trip I got to swim with a blue whale, a bryte’s whale and a pod of humpbacks, but nothing gets me as excited as swimming with a dozen marlin that have a bait ball pinned to the surface.