Revillagigedos archipelago, Mexico

Photo: Alex Mustard Photo: Alex Mustard Photo: Alex Mustard Photo: Alex Mustard Photo: Alex Mustard

Staring into the blue plays funny tricks on the eyes. Shapes materialised and evaporated. I hung in the water, rising and falling in the surge as the lazy Pacific swells collided with the vertical volcanic walls of the El Boiler dive site. Suddenly, I was overcome by that feeling of being watched. I spun around to find myself face to face with a 4m-long, black Pacific manta. ‘Hello. Where did you come from?’ I spent the next hour captivated as four mantas circled our group and played with our bubbles.

Manta diving here is special because the rays seem as keen on the encounters as the divers. The mantas used to allow divers to scratch them, and although touching has now rightly been banned, the mantas still approach and hover in your bubbles. In fact, they come right up to you: you make a connection as you stare into their eyes and they stare back. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience. Add to this the remoteness of the place, the size and deep-black colour of the mantas and the beautiful orange clarion angelfish cleaners, and you have an intoxicating recipe for wonderful diving.

The Revillagigedos, or Socorro as they are known to many divers (it’s the name of the largest island in the group), are in the eastern Pacific Ocean off Mexico – an almost identical distance from the UK as the Maldives. However, the as-the-plane-flies distance does not tell the whole story, because once you leave the airport, you still have a 24-hour steam out into the Pacific to the islands. Their remoteness means this is liveaboard-only destination.

Diving is usually around three islands – Socorro, San Benedicto and Roca Partida – with mantas seen on almost all of the popular dive sites. It is not uncommon to see them on the majority of the dives on your trip. Compared with the Maldives, there are fewer mantas here: the population is thought to be about 150 individuals, and they tend to show up singly or in small groups. In the Maldives, numbers can reach double figures at a popular cleaning station. However, any hot site there will be besieged with divers too, with several boats wanting to claim the same bit of water at the same time. In Socorro, the only divers you are likely to see are those you are diving with.

Part of the reason that Socorro attracts fewer divers is that it offers temperate diving – the water temperature was 20°C during my February visit – and is exposed to the Pacific’s swells. There are no coral reefs and, while there are lots of fish, they generally lack the colour and diversity seen in the tropics. There are plenty of pelagics, though. You’ll encounter massive schools of jacks, tuna, dolphins and good numbers of sharks: I saw white-tips, silkies, scalloped hammerheads, silvertips and Galápagos sharks. If you go in January or February, you are also likely to hear humpback whales on several dives and have the thrill of seeing them on most surface intervals.

Socorro trips are a little more expensive than a similar length of holiday in the Maldives. An eight-day charter is about £1,500, depending on the exchange rate, and this does not include flights. That said, MV Solmar V is one of the best-run boats I have been on, with first-class food and all drinks included.

Getting there is easy: fly to a US hub, such as Houston or Dallas, and then hop down to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Allow enough time for your connections, as you will have to clear US immigration both ways. The good news for divers is that you’ll get a far more generous trans-Atlantic baggage allowances than when flying east to the Maldives. The long steam out to the islands is ideal for getting over jet lag, too.

The Maldives may provide the ideal tropical escape, but if you want to make a real connection with mantas, avoid the crowds and have the bragging rights about a destination that few others have visited, I’d suggest Socorro.