Dear Reader:
Forty minutes into a dive on the Cholos sea mount,
I peeked over a ledge to find an intense boil of whitetipped
sharks. Several two-foot bluefin trevally jacks
were in the action, along with scissortail chromis,
Pacific creolefish and other small creatures at the edges
of this mysterious fish blender. I, my two friends and
our divemaster Glenn Messingham had front row seats at a
display of pure energy, punctuated with strikes by one
fish at another.
It was but one of the dramatic scenes I saw underwater
during my January stay at Isla Coiba, a 20-milelong
island that lies 25 miles from the fishing town of
Santa Catalina on Panama’s Pacific coast. The visibility
and currents can be problematic, but the fish life is of
Jurassic proportions. Glenn, who had promised me that he
would find giant frogfish, made good on that same dive
by finding three huge yellow ones. Cholos, like many dive
sites around Isla Coiba, is like Cozumel, but with rocks.
Huge pinnacles, cracks and ledges top out at 45 feet. The
currents have mood swings, either coming from one direction
or another or just lying still.
Isla Coiba’s only accommodations |
Undercurrent wrote about Scuba Coiba last year and
its mainland dives
near Santa Catalina,
but the prime diving
is found on its
three-day trips to
Isla Coiba. Until
recently, Isla Coiba
was a penal colony,
but thankfully it is
now part of Coiba
National Park and
UNESCO World Heritage
Site, about 1,000
square miles. There are no condos, casinos or commercial
fishing on the island. Accommodations
are dorm-style, but roughing it on the
food and lodging is worth waking up in
your own private paradise to bird songs,
doing three interesting dives per day,
and spending intervals on beautiful uninhabited
isles watching the sand crabs
or looking for crocodile tracks. Panama
itself is easy to get to from any U.S.
airport, offering as much lush beauty and
rainforest wonder as its next-door neighbor
Costa Rica but with fewer people and at a lower cost. Forget about the days
of Noriega – this is a friendly, gringo-easy country with good roads, cheap
gas, clean tap water, and English is widely understood.
I rented a car at the Panama City airport for a pleasant 4.5 hour drive
to Santa Catalina, most of it on the four-lane Pan American Highway. The rain
forest soon gave way to cane fields, then pastures. I entered Santa Catalina,
where I stopped at the first sign I saw, Sol y Mar. After a steep stair climb,
I settled into a surprisingly modern room. I then visited Scuba Coiba’s headquarters,
at the foot of the town’s main street to the beach, and made plans to
start my three-day trip the next morning.
The 75-minute boat ride from Santa Catalina to the Coiba archipelago was
fortunately smooth. After unloading bags and food at the base camp, we went
out for dives in the shop’s 25-foot dive panga with a Bimini top and 80-
horsepower Yamaha motor. Even with just three divers, Scuba Coiba used a threeperson
crew for all dives – Glenn, dive assistant Luis Terrero and boat captain
Orlando. The boat had no rinse tank, but was equipped with tank racks, ladder,
DAN O2 kit and a radio. For a multiple-day trip like mine, they brought a
fourth staffer, a cook named Manny who also refilled tanks from the dive shop’s
compressor on the island. Air fills for the 80-cu-ft. tanks were consistently
3,000 psi.
Glenn, a Canadian expat who had been working at Scuba Coiba for the past
year, took us to a site he hadn’t dived at before, Dos Tetas (yeah, you got it)
on the western side of the island. There are no buoyed sites; boats anchor only
to set a descent line that is then hauled in for drift diving. Luis found Dos
Tetas straight away and joined us on that dive. It turned out to be my favorite,
with 50- to 100-foot visibility, big craggy formations, and incredible
schools. At one point, swarms of big-eye trevally, blue-and-gold snapper and
spottail grunts were in view all at once, with gafftopsail pompano overhead. I
did an occasional 360 just to marvel at the numbers, size and variety. Beneath
me, a shark cruised through a car wash of small de-lousing fish, and I eased
into a school of king angels. Since Glenn, divemaster at the only dive operation
within 100 miles, was here for the first time, it’s a good bet that few of
these fish had seen a diver before. I could make out a loose school of blackfin
barracuda cruising overhead, and my buddy pointed off in the blue to a couple
of reef cornetfish. As we made our way to the top of the two tetas at 30-foot
depths, I played hide-and-seek with various tube blennies, including the Panamic
barnacle blenny with its bright red eyes.
There were a few restrictions: No deco diving, and signal at 700 psi to
start ascent. Glenn said he didn’t plan any dives deeper than 85 feet but we
could go where we wanted, as long as we stayed within sight. I never wanted to
go deeper, as the fish action and better visibility were a little above. Next
was a site near the mouth of the Santa Cruz River. Near the bottom at 75 feet,
we were in murky water with 15-foot visibility, but when I moved up to 60 feet,
visibility increased to 50 feet. Cool down-currents breezed through. The rocky slopes held more variety of hard corals than other sites. This was an aquarium
dive, with loads of giant damsels, amarillo snappers, razor surgeonfish, guinea
fowl puffers and a few starry morays. Glenn pointed to a scorpion fish that I
never would have seen because it has better camouflage than its Caribbean cousins.
My buddy showed me a Panamic green moray as fat as a telephone pole but
with a normal-size head, giving it the look of a bizarre mutant.
Our base camp was at Coiba Park’s ranger station. Pretty spartan, the only
luxury being hammocks strung up in shady spots. Its cabañas – the only accommodations
on the island – were clean but modest. We three shared a room with six
twin beds and a bathroom with shower. The room was air-conditioned, but it was
cool enough for us to kill the AC and enjoy the night breeze and sounds. The
park could have bunked others in our room, but it was far from crowded while we
were there. Another cabaña had a group of North Americans from a sport fishing
boat, and some students set up tents on the beach.
Between dives, we ate lunch on picnic tables. Panama homecooking, such as
chicken soup with potatoes and various Caribbean root vegetables, was basic but
most welcome. Crimson-backed tanagers and tropical kingbirds flitted by while
some park workers played dominoes at another table. Dinner was fish stew. We
dodged the Kool-Aid-like beverage offered by bringing our own beer (at $3 per
six-pack, who can resist?). The tap water is potable here.
One morning, after a shot of coffee at 6:30 am, I took a short stroll
on the nature trail to find birds and agouti. Coiba is just about the last
stand in Panama for the gorgeous scarlet macaw, and there are 36 types of mammals
here, including mantled howler and white-faced monkeys, but seeing them
involved a boat trip to a longer trail far from the park HQ. Tempting, but not
appealing enough for me to skip a couple of dives.
We had good visibility, water temperatures in the low 80s and manageable
currents on most dives. However, the upwellings and convergent currents
that make it a fish mecca can also make diving more difficult. Scuba Coiba’s
Austrian expat owner Herbie Sunk told me that divers often encounter some dives with 20-foot visibility. Late
February through April typically
marks the time for upwellings of cold
water below thermoclines, along with
some pelagics.
Scuba Coiba often can’t dive
Mali Mali (one of many sites named by
local fishermen) due to currents, but
it was quite mellow for us. I found
a peacock razorfish with a tower of
a dorsal fin and an argus moray, the
sixth moray species I saw on this
trip, swimming freely. A green was
out in the open, enjoying a cleaning,
while large tarpon swam above.
I saw several white-tipped sharks
(but no other sharks) on every Coiba
dive. Oddly, they are rarely found
on dives at the mainland near Santa
Catalina. During my trip I positively
ID’d 75 fish, as I broke in Paul
Humann’s new Baja to Panama book.
Just three of those are found in the
Caribbean: eagle rays, tarpon, and balloonfish. Many others are genus-mates, as
the isthmus closed only 2.5 million years ago. You Caribbean divers will readily
recognize the Panamic porkfish, Mexican goatfish, flagtail tilefish and
dozens more since you’re already on good terms with their siblings. My dive
partner, an invertebrate nut, was busy finding new, strange urchins and starfish,
very different from those I’ve seen in the Sea of Cortez. After my trip,
I wrote to Humann begging for an Eastern Pacific invertebrate book (but he’s
occupied for the next year compiling one for the Indo-Pacific).
Three days worked well for great diving and kicking back in a hammock
with David McCullough’s book, The Path Between the Seas, a history of the
Panama Canal. A three-day, nine-dive trip to Isla Coiba is a little pricey,
but reasonable considering that they took four staff for our group of three.
Essentially we had a private charter trip, but the “private” part may not last.
Scuba Coiba has eked out an existence for four years, but since Undercurrent
“discovered” it a year ago, I was told, business has doubled and now includes
serious divers.
Back in Santa Catalina, we landed at the beach and waded to shore. The crew
lugged, washed and secured our gear. Granted, three days does not a full trip
make, so I headed for my room back at Sol Y Mar, stopping en route to stock
the mini-fridge. I spent a couple of more days in Santa Catalina, doing two
dives per day to nearby sites (20 minutes per trip), with plenty of time to
kick back. This is the kind of place where pickup trucks share the main street
with kids playing ball and folks on horseback. After a couple of days, I felt
like I recognized half the people in town. (For a more detailed report on Santa
Catalina, see Undercurrent’s March 2006 issue.)
The diving off the coast is similar to Isla Coiba but with fewer big
schools and less variety in the sites. We dived Snapper Point twice (Herbie
Sunk called it the best near-shore site) on different sides of the seamount,
with very different fish life and terrain. The first dive was very fishy, with
lots of razor surgeons, king angels, jacks, the odd-shaped bumphead parrot, and
hundreds of Pacific creolefish seeming to follow us around. On our return trip,
I sampled a stiff surface current. After I backrolled, Luis dropped a hand line to pull me to the anchor line. As I made my way down, the divers above looked
like socks on a clothesline in a stiff wind. Then the current diminished to a
slight breeze near the bottom. This side offered fewer fish but did boast a
slope covered in sea fans, some housing long-nosed hawkfish. My friend took pictures
of some weird-looking urchins with electric blue spots, white spines and
a central cap. Other dives off Santa Catalina are on similar rocky formations
with scant coral, but every hole is a fish haven. In one, I found a Pacific dog
snapper so big I swear it could not get out. Between dives, we spent an hour on
a deserted black-sand beach. It’s BYO for snacks and drinks on the local dives.
After a day of diving, I stopped at a little joint near the dive shop for a lunch
of rice and beans, and swapped stories with Dutch surfers who had tried out the waves at Estero Beach, one mile
out of town. On the way back to
Sol y Mar, I usually picked up
a beer at the outdoor bar filled
with locals, sometimes dancing
and always listening to loud
music. The only other folks at
the four-room inn were a Utah
couple who were biking all over
Panama. One night, I joined them
for dinner at Pide, a small restaurant
run by an Argentine that
serves grilled meat, fish or
prawns with the signature chimichurri
sauce. Locals and the
dive staff are more likely to
be found at an Italian-run place
that serves good pizza. These are
the three restaurants in town,
all family-run, outdoors and
good joints to make friends and
exchange email addresses.
I love being far from destinations
where Carlos n’ Charlie’s
is around the corner from the
Hard Rock Café. Santa Catalina is on the opposite end of that spectrum. It may
not be for long. It’s been “discovered,” not only by Undercurrent but by land
speculators, too. Sol y Mar’s owner Luis Silva told me that when he came here
11 years ago, most folks didn’t have indoor toilets but now some of them have
satellite TV or a nice truck as a result of selling their land. Condos can’t be
many years off. I felt pretty good about crossing the isthmus ahead of the crowd.
-M.A.
Scuba Coiba charges $580 for a three-day, nine-dive trip,
including meals, cabaña and park fee...Two-tank day trips from
Santa Catalina are $55 for near-shore sites, $95 (+$10 park
fee) for day trips to Coiba ... Ask for a discount for multidays
diving with more than one person ... Scuba Coiba offers
certifications and gear rentals but it only has 3-mm shorty
wetsuits, and no Nitrox ... No decent snorkeling from the mainland,
but non-divers can tag along cheaply ($85 for a threeday
trip) to Isla Coiba, where there is good snorkeling from
the boat ... The best way to reach owner Herbie Sunk was by e-mail -- he was
not very prompt with replies but he was helpful, and he also arranges overnight
accommodations at a few choices in town ... American, Continental, Delta
and Panama’s Copa Air fly to Panama City for approximately $550 to $650 ...
In Panama City, I stayed at Hotel Marbella ($45 for a double with breakfast
included; hmarbella@cableonda.net)... I rented a car, but if you are going
only to Santa Catalina and Coiba, you can easily use the frequent buses ...
To break up the return trip, I spent a day in El Valle in the hills below
the cloud forest near Panama City to do some birding; day trips from Panama
City are very easy to arrange to the canal locks, Soberanía rainforest park,
or Colón ... Santa Catalina is dirt cheap: A double room at Sol y Mar with
mini-fridge, A/C, hot shower and satellite TV is $40 ... good dinners are $6,
breakfast $2, and beer $1 ... Scuba Coiba’s website: www.scubacoiba.com.