Trip Report

The sea was still as we started our voyage to Cocos Island, throughout the trip the seas stayed mellow. At Chatham Bay where we started our dives, we had a nice encounter with a turtle that looked kind of nervous, suddenly a medium size tiger shark appeared and crossed between us, than 30 seconds later an even bigger tiger shark started circling. By then we could understand why that turtle was “freaking out.” This glimpse at the apex predators around the island put everything into perspective. After that dive we explored Manuelita but with respect to hammerhead activity, the action hadn’t arrived. We did get a taste of what was to come out at dirty rock. Though there wasn’t an abundance of hammerheads there was a party of 6 Galapagos sharks accompanied by several blacktip sharks along for the swim.
Then on day 3 we dove Manuelita coral garden again and something changed, the current inverted and all of a sudden it was all hammerheads all the time, it was phenomenal so we kept coming back. Tiger sharks were a common sight on the Manuelita dives and we were encountering Galapagos sharks out at Alcyone. On day 6 out at Alcyone we had one of the most memorable dives with walls of hammers all over around, Galapagos sharks, blacktips, and silky sharks all making appearances by coming in very close. The hammerhead schooling at Alcyone which can be unreal was upstaged by the enormous schools of hammerheads we were seeing at Dirty Rock. The biggest school we watched out in the blue must have been made up of more than 80 hammerheads. Back at Manuelita outside we had such great visits from hammerhead sharks at the cleaning stations. On day seven we had at least 40 minutes of non-stop action with hammerheads right up in our face! None of that could compare to what our dive guides described as the dive of the month. For 30 minutes we watched in amazement, out at dirty rock, as a pod of dolphins played with and hunted a massive school of jack. This was just extraordinary, the dolphins seemed like they knew what we wanted, showed of their moves, coming closer and closer to us. Simply on of the best experiences ever. We all felt grateful for the abundance of marine life we had experienced. The seas could feel our contentment and gave us a peaceful crossing back to Puntarenas.