Cork Sub Aqua Club

Four divers from Cork SAC, Steve Clare myself and Brian went to Cocos Island and Costa Rica in August. Since then quite a few people have been asking me: “when are we going to see your photos from Cocos?”. You see the problem has been that, after my old camera gave up the ghost in 2008 I kinda lost interest in underwater photography for a while, before buying Graham’s old camera to try out an SLR. With one thing and another I only got about half a dozen dives with the SLR before I went to Cocos, and really only decided to bring the camera at the last minute, so I have been a bit shy about showing the photos which I know to be not the best. Nevertheless the dives in Cocos were brilliant and I hope the photos don’t do them too much of an injustice. Anyhow Brian has the better photos, so ask him too!
If you ever saw the start of ‘Jurassic Park’, the jungle covered island that the intrepid dinosaur seekers fly into is Isla Del Coco: or Cocos island. The island, and the waters around it, are a national park of Costa Rica. Eight park rangers and maybe some coast guard are the only residents. To put it in an Irish context, Cocos is about the size of Valentia Island, maybe a bit smaller. It is a thirty six hour boat trip from Puntarenas (The main pacific port of Costa Rica). It is steep with dense foliage, and volcanic in origin. The coastline, apart from a few bays, consists mainly of steep cliffs down which numerous waterfalls cascade. According to Wikipedia it gets an an average annual rainfall of over 7,000 mm (275 in). That is about seven times the annual rainfall that Cork gets. There is a dry season and a wet season. We went in the wet season. The boat has a rainwater collection system. Long hot showers are not a problem, the tap water is drinkable, and unique in my experience of liveaboards elsewhere: in Egypt or Australia; there is a laundry service aboard ! But it didn’t rain that much, a bit for the first few days, the sea was 27 to 29 degrees C, and we were glad of a bit of cloud cover because when the sun shone it was almost too hot. All the waterfalls are very atmospheric, like a lost world, but the amount of fresh water during the wet season tends to affect underwater visibility a bit. Dry season it seems is clearer but with fewer fish.
Enough about annual rainfall and laundry, what about the sharks? There are many to see, on every dive, and sometimes your field of vision is filled with them. So dense that the hammerheads almost look like flocks of birds wheeling and swooping above. Not just Hammerheads, but also silver tips, white tips, black tips (which we didn’t see), galapagos sharks, silkies (which kinda look like galapagos sharks except to an expert), whale sharks (which another boat saw). The difference between white tips and silver tips is that white tips have white tips just on dorsal fin and top of tail and are smaller, silver tips are larger and have a silver trailing edge to all their fins. I have seen big sharks before, even hammerheads, but never the huge schools that you see at Cocos. Plenty of rays too including manta, marble ray, and mobula. The usual reef wildlife that would amaze you elsewhere: moray, turtles, lobsters and all, seem almost to be bit players, with the sharks as the stars of the show.
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Congor_lings

Seeing as their was no plans for today, I decided the weather was too good to waste……. Its not every day you get flat seas, scorching sunshine and only a handful of divers – making the organising very easy. We headed out for the Lings at 9am hoping to catch slack tide… and conditions were perfect. After taking the scenic route for a while, our coxn made it in perfect time for slack water. Shot dropped, and straight down to 25m where we were surrounded by crayfish and pollock. Loads of life, even a free-swimming congor or two. Visibility was great and everyone had a beautiful dive.

After pulling the shot, we headed for home – but we got stuck in traffic. Everyone was very upset when we were delayed behind some pesky dolphins, intent on circling and riding the bow wave. Dolphins cleared, and we then noticed some old netting on the water. Delighted to pull in the nets and make the water safe, our humanitarian effort went out the window when we unleashed hundreds of tiny bait fish into the deck of the boat – only to suffer a flapping, petrol infused death on the Cuanmhara floor.

Dolphins cleared, nets removed and after commiting tiny fish genocide – we had a clear run until we got stuck again. About to plane straight through some feeding birds we noticed a fin or two on the surface. We tried to dodge them, but we were stuck again. This time we had to get in and try move our obstructors out of the way. Bloody basking sharks -obviously not aware that it was lunchtime for us aswell. So we managed to shoo them away and then it was the fish’s turn. Huge schools of mackerel started going crazy – it was like watching a bait-ball on one of those BBC documentaries! Birds, fish, basking sharks, jelly fish all conspired to delay us again for another hour. Only when the child like scream of a grown man staring into a basking shark mouth was heard, did we manage to get away.

Eventually we made it through rush hour and hit the slip just in time for lunch. I think we should stay on shore dives from now on, theirs just too much distration outside…….