This is a collection of my blog entries and experiences with diving.
You can find all the pictures I've taken here, and read below for recountings of my more recent trips:
As part of our trip on the Argos in Cocos Island, we signed up for 2 dives on the onboard sub from DeepSee submarine that is part of the boat (although sub dives do cost extra :) ).
The sub is a 3 person sub (pilot and 2 passengers), has 3 different battery systems, and the equivalent of a rebreather system for the cabin to give occupants breathable air for 3 days in case of emergency. While it has full freedom of movement, it's not very fast for horizontal trust, so it gets towed by the surface boat which also keeps constant comms (both voice and telemetry). The cool thing is that they can send location to the sub underneath by locating it compared to the boat's GPS location using sonar.
After arriving Cocos on the Argos and doing some dives on the first day, the second morning we went for our first dive to 100 meters. The whole thing was almost 2H.
A few pictures below:
A few short clips from my camera:
And a 6mn summary of the whole thing taken from my gopro (feel free to skip forward inside it, it's not action packed :) ):
The next afternoon, we went back for a longer 3H+ dive to 300 meters. We got lucky to see Rays swimming around us during the dive, and had a peek at the ocean bottom and the critters that live there in virtually no light:
Here are some videos of the rays going around us during the dive:
And 7mn summary of the 3h dive:
So, my impressions?
It's obviously an experience in a lifetime, not many people have gone to 300 meters under water
As a geek, of course, I could not but be impressed with the sub. It's super cool see it work, especially if you think about the geolocation technology, marine com technology, and how it can even know how it's moving compared to the ground thanks to 4 sonar pings going down and using the doppler effect on the returning signal.
Taking pictures was difficult because the dome acts as a big prism that splits light colors and makes all pictures somewhat blurry, especially if you try to zoom. The one exception are pictures you're taking without external lighting (mostly pictures above you) which since they're mostly blue, don't have the light splitting problem and look nicer.
All the pictures below are geotagged, so you can click on them to see where they were taken
Cocos is interesting and different, starting with the fact that it requires a 36H trip each way to get there (no runways and too far to get via helicopter). We chose the Argos since it was part of the dive alliance, which contains the best boats in each location, and because they had a special research trip chartered by TIRN (Turtle Island Restoration Network) that was longer than usual (9 days of diving and 3 days travelling).
Cocos belongs to Costa Rica which we spent a week to visit before the diving trip.
It's a 36H boat trip away from Puntarenas:
We got the chance to get talks from Todd, Randall, and Brock about their efforts to save turtles and sharks from overfishing, fishing bycatch, and illegal shark fining. Brock, who volunteers/has volunteered at multiple such organizations, including Sea Shepherds, also joined us. They have been responsible for so much work to help sea life along the years that it was great to learn about it, even if much work still needs to be done. You can read more on the seaturtles.org, Pretoma, Sea Shepherd, and Fin Free sites.
I got a picture with them at the end of our trip:
They organized this trip to tag some sharks and turtles (to see their migration patterns and help keep zones fishing free to hopefully help curbing their clear decline) as well as take some tissue samples from some sharks.
We also did 2 submarine dives to 100 and 300 meters respectively, as explained on this page
Here is the map of what we dived (3 dives a day and just a few night dives):
Argos is a big converted boat with a crane to move skiffs and the submarine on and off the boat:
the inside was spacious enough
The crew kept us well fed :)
Of course, we were there to dive. Argos had some nice skiffs:
Cocos was full of sharks, and mostly fish that sharks don't eat, like lots of puffers, boxfishes, and porcupine fishes (they are all poisonous):
When these two have sex:
with those two:
You get this :)
porcupine fish
this one actually looked pissed off :)
boxfish
this one is "hunting" by blowing on sand to look for things:
This shows sharks bumping into a poor puffer fish and confirming that they don't want to eat it:
Lots of eels, mostly moray eels that have an understanding with sharks, and don't get eaten either:
they always look mean, but this one genuinely seemed to be
this one looked mellow
and had nice bloodshot eyes
Plenty of other eels:
Same thing with triggerfish, some of which were quite colorful:
And same thing with rays too, from marble rays, eagle rays, and mobula rays, some were bigger than sharks:
whitetip sharks mating:
Interstingly, sharks didn't seem to eat flounder fish either:
Hell, they don't even eat lobster, they really go after the easy prey:
Lots of sharks, many many whitetip sharks:
this shark had an old tag
Of course, there were plenty of hammerheads, but we're told not nearly as many as there used to be, unfortunately thanks to illegal shark finning, sadly a lot came from Taiwanese boats :(
Usually we got to see hammerheads at cleaning stations. Here, you can see the barberfish which act as cleaning fish. The hammerheads find them and swim in the middle of them:
Other sharks:
a tiger shark, those are huge and eat turtles amongst other things
silvertip
The night dives were 'interesting'. Sharks followed us to feed. That was impressive and sad for the fish being eaten:
This video shows the shark feeding, and it gets a bit insane. Poor little fish:
But we found some crabs and lobsters, and even a slipper lobster:
On a couple of dives, some wild dolphins came to check us out:
We got to see several huge schools of fish, mostly jacks:
Other misc fishes:
those fish change color from black to white
Also, some jelly fishes:
One day we went on the island for a short hike:
a collection of fishing hooks collected by the rangers
this bridge was made with confiscated fishing gear
And here are a few pictures taken from the dive boats:
lots of small volcanic islands
Of course, lots of birds, mostly boobies and frigate birds:
Unfortunately the location of our boat prevented viewing any sunsets, and I didn't catch any sunrise, so I got this:
Unfortunately, we didn't get to see any turtles, having over 63,000 turtles fished and killed per year just in Costa Rica waters, by long line fisheries (thousands of hooks on multi kilometer lines strung under water).
Also, what doesn't help either that tiger sharks have become more abundant in Cocos and like to eat turtles :(
But this was a great trip, 9 days of nice diving, plus 72 hours traversing to Cocos and back :)
But again, these ecosystems are vanishing fast. The amount of sharks that are being killed just for shark finning, is unbelievable, and the number of turtles and other sea animals thare being killed mistakenly just as bycatch for other seafood we eat, is a huge problem.
Please take a chance to learn more aobut these problems and spread the word, contribute, and/or donate:
