Trip report by Sarah Whittemore
Photos by Aaron Whittemore

Even before I became a diver, my father would take great joy in telling me fantastic tales about Cocos Island. He often called it the best diving destination in the world, praising the multitudes of life and claiming that a diver in Cocos was likely to suffer whiplash from trying to decide what to look at first. I was fascinated but a little skeptical, so when I found myself bound to Cocos on the Undersea Hunter, I was eager to see whether the stories could possibly be true. The thirty-six hour traveling period gave the crew and passengers a good chance to get acquainted and acted as the foundation for a good-natured rivalry between the blue and yellow diving teams or, as they came to be known, the Whale Shark and Whale- Sharks-Mating teams. Our first dive was a shallow checkout dive, which many of us believed would be tame and relaxing-we were wrong. Within the first minute, dozens of white tips, eels, turtles, flounder, and other huge schools of fish greeted us. Just like the stories, I found myself in danger of whiplash that is, until the hammerheads showed up.

When a properly stealthy dive style was employed-Juan Manuel aptly christened it the "James Bond Diving Technique"-close up encounters with these amazingly beautiful and powerful sharks could follow. After that first amazing dive, it was hard to believe that things could get much better, but Cocos continued to surprise and impress. Every dive that week sported several white tips and an abundance of marine creatures. Throughout the week, we spotted blacktips, silkies, silvertips, and Galapagos sharks. Alcyone quickly became a favorite site, especially for the blue team, after a particularly awesome dive yielded schools of jacks, marbled rays, white tips, hundreds of hammerheads schooling overhead, and a brief encounter with a pod of dolphins.

It was Alcyone that provided the trip's photographers with opportunities to capture the prized silhouette shot of the hammerhead schools. And, although the yellow team won the whale shark-spotting competition at a site named Small Dos Amigos, it was Alcyone that allowed the blue team to win back their pride with a whale shark sighting of their own. Another memorable dive was the white tip night dive at Manuelita Coral Gardens. Each night, hundreds of white tip sharks would gather to hunt for reef fish; the swirling stream of predators stalking prey and maneuvering into impossibly tight cracks in the coral was an incredible sight. Other highlights included mantas, devil rays, red- lipped batfish, eagle rays, and box crabs.

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