|
CORALREPUBLIC Cocos
Island, Costa Rica, 2005
|
|
|
|
|
|
Trip
dates: |
25 August– 4
September 2005 |
|
Boat
/ resort: |
|
|
Dive
centre: |
The Hunter Fleet |
|
Photo-friendly?: |
Very friendly,
camera table and charging stations. |
|
Number
of dives: |
21 over 7 days of
diving. |
|
Diving
conditions: |
Rainy most of the
time, choppy seas in all sites save Manuelita. Very
choppy in Alcyone (difficult entry, not for beginners at all). Strong
currents in some sites. Good visibility, but a bit murky in shallow sites
(e.g. during night dives). Water temperature 26°C, but a thermocline between
20 and 25 m under which the temperature fell to less than 20°C. Nitrox diving is a must here. |
|
Comments: |
A dream trip. We
did not see whale sharks or silvertips, but all the same, what a place! This
is an Island where one really gets the sensation of pristine nature. It is
not, there is fishing and considerable other human impacts there, but the
scenery is so rugged and wild that you forget it. One day we landed to visit
the single Costa Rican ranger that lives in the Island with his chicken and
pigs. Nice guy, lovely front yard. We had a
relatively good crossing, and that was luck. I get very seasick, and we had a
bad jetlag from the flights to Costa Rica. The Hunter Crew
will fetch you from your hotel in San Jose and drive you for 2 hours to the
port of Puntarenas, in the Pacific Coast. The drive is lovely itself. Then
you board and sail for 36 hours to Cocos (we made
it in 32, actually). I spent the crossing sleeping on Dramamine in my bunk,
and that despite the good crossing. You get there at
dawn, and what a sight it is. The diving is
made from very good pangas. These are hard-hull
dinghies with a tank rack where your equipment stays for the trip. We did a
good four dives a day. The panga rides could be
quite choppy and I got close to being sick a couple of times. I also got a
bad case of ear infection and had to stay out of the water for a day and a
half. Ever since I have taken care to carry an ear dryer or disinfectant
spray with me on trips. Audispray works very well. We had close
encounters with Galapagos sharks, especially on Dirty Rock and Dos Amigos.
Our divemaster was a bit worried. They seem to
think these are the most risky sharks around, but they might have been
playing to excite us. We dove many times with the captain, who sometimes went
down with a speargun to tag hammerheads for a research
project. Turtles and marble rays were all around, the hammerhead schools were
great in Alcyone, and the cleaning
stations in Manuelita
made for very close encounters with single hammerheads. The Alcyone site is a
seamount dived first by the Cousteau team from the namesake ship. The top
lies at about 25-30m, the entry is in full open water. When the seas are
choppy it is a challenging dive, since there is always current. Backroll in in, grab the line and start descent, all that
with a camera… not easy, but I got used to it. I did not find
the night dives with the whitetip reef sharks very
exciting. We got to see the feeding frenzy, yes, but the whole business was a
bit chaotic, we kept bumping into each other. No chance for decent shots,
perhaps I’m too demanding. Cocos is a place I would really like to dive again. It where I took the
picture that is probably my all-time favourite, the schooling jacks that
feature in the entry page of this website. I shot with my
Olympus C-5050Z and a single Inon D-2000 strobe. I
used Inon wet WA lenses, which I was very happy
with. PS.: This was the
time when Katrina hit New Orleans. Being cut from the world while on the
boat, we only learnt of it the day we disembarked. One of the divers on the
boat had his family there, he later wrote to tell us that thank God they all
were safe. |
|
|
|
