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Cocos 2006 Journal |
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November 19, 2006
San Jose, Costa Rica. 9:30 AM
 The journey begins. We board the bus bound for Puntarenas, our port of embarkation where the Sea Hunter awaits.
In the last day I've met our expedition team one by one. They are a wonderful cross section of like-minded divers and conservationists. Ron and Elaine from Little Rock, Arkansas; Kyle and Shannon from Durham, North Carolina; Richard and Judy from Lafayette, California; Seth from Colorado Springs (my roommate and a budding marine biologist); Jim from St. Thomas; Nick from St. Maarten; Jonathan from San Francisco; Kerstin from Key Largo; Jay's dad Loyal (whom I'm also privileged to have as a roommate); Judy from New Orleans (who is already my friend from the last Indonesia adventure); and of course, Georgienne and Jay, the leaders of, and the inspiration for the expedition.
After a four-hour ride we arrive and board the Sea Hunter, where we meet the last part of our team, Nora and Jose from the Dominican Republic. The Sea Hunter is a 120' live-aboard dive boat and has been operating in the waters around Cocos Island for 16 years.
Toby gives a welcome presentation and briefing, and introduces the crew. After a short intro by Georgienne, the next couple of hours are a blur of suitcases, stairways, cameras and dive gear.
Sea Hunter, 5:00 PM
Georgienne gives a video presentation showing some of IF's accomplishments and direction. After which she explains our overall goals, not only for the current expedition, but also for the foundation in general. "To develop a professional database of images, still and video, designed for educational distribution." She goes on to explain how this will be accomplished and how this team will impact those goals. For example, the major role that Kyle has taken on is in the software development and design of the database for video cataloging. After a Q&A and a great dinner, although sparsely attended due to rolling seas, several of us retire to the lounge to watch a DVD about (what else?) Cocos Island. I'd say this is a pretty good indicator of the group's focus and dedication.
November 20, 2006
 This morning we are greeted by sunshine and blue skies. There is still quite a swell, however, causing both crew and guests to meander uncontrollably from wall to wall seeking the safety of the next solid object within reach. Seth said that the rocking of the ship made going down the stairways, with their strategically placed handholds, more of a controlled fall than a descent. We are about 20 hours into the 300 nautical mile journey, meaning we will be at sea the rest of the day. The group is taking advantage of the downtime working on cameras, watching 'Blue Planet' and gathering into discussion groups to go over their roles for the coming week. The various expedition tasks are explained and assigned to individuals. Tasks are ranging from easy,low tech, including a note writing campaign, to video cataloging still images, to video clipping and captioning. The goals are set, the work begins.
The Sea Hunter is an extremely well designed and equipped ship. The crew is friendly and helpful. There is plenty of storage in the cabins. The camera workspaces are large with their own power sources and air guns. The dive deck is well laid out with individual storage. The saloon is spacious with state of the art audio/visual equipment, and a mini-bar full of water, soft drinks and beer. The galley is roomy and comfortable. And (perhaps its finest feature) it has a cappuccino machine! I am impressed.
We are only a few hours from the island. The relentless rhythm of the swells is causing people to fall asleep where they sit or drift off to their cabins.
I found Jonathan reading in the library. He was proud to have been studying a fish ID book all afternoon to prepare for the upcoming dives, until he realized it was an Indian Ocean guide (and I think it was in German).
Sea Hunter, 10:00 PM
 Jose came into the saloon to tell us to come out on deck. We were approaching the island. We could make out the lights of another ship at anchor. A brown booby landed on the deck and Jay walked over and picked him up. After a few photos and loud protestations the bird was back in the air. The dark shadow on the horizon came into focus. It was a 200-foot wall of the island. After securing the mooring, the engines finally fall silent after a day and a half. We're now next to the island under a brilliant dome of starlight.
Sea Hunter, 6:30 AM
 The first dive is an hour away. This team has come great distances by air, land and sea from a dozen different locales to see Cocos Island and what lies beneath. After months of planning and preparation, that day is here.
Manuelita Inside
There are dozens of whitetip reef sharks wherever you look. Look up and there is a huge school of blue spotted jacks. Look down and several hundred goldrimmed surgeonfish roll along the bottom as if they are one organism. Three rainbow runners are following one whitetip, taking turns scraping their bodies across his to rid themselves of parasites. The rest of the dive is filled with grunts, snappers, creole fish and lobsters.
After we arrive back on Sea Hunter, the atmosphere is charged with excitement, laughter, hot showers and every sentence begins with the words "Did you see that ___________???
 Before the next dive there is a team meeting to ensure that everyone understands his or her daily schedules. Georgienne describes each task and its significance in the overall strategy. The notecard task is an intoduction to IF that will be mailed to dive clubs across the US. Hours of high definition footage must be cut into short , managable clips to be added to the new video database. Thousands of still images already exist in their own database, but they must be captioned and cross referenced for the search engine. The website is in the process of being translated into Spanish. Nora, from the Dominican Republic, has taken on this task.People start to understand where they fit in and why they are needed. It is probably the point in time of the expedition where you can actually see the group become the team. Completed note cards are starting to pile up.
Manuelita Channel
 If Cocos had a synonym it would be 'hammerheads'. We had a dozen or more hammerheads grace us with their presence on this dive. They are shy creatures and will retreat from bubbles. It is quite exciting to walk the tightrope between seeing them or breathing.
Minutes later we were treated to a procession of about ten spotted eagle rays in a line on the sandy bottom. Five blacktip reef sharks were close by. A large sea turtle appeared and seemed to swim with us for a while. As we were surfacing a big wahoo came out of the shadows and did a full circle around our group.
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 There was, as usual, a large number of whitetip reef sharks, but they had become commonplace after just one dive. Jim put it well later that evening when he said, "whitetips were everywhere, they were swimming between peoples' legs and they didn't even notice".
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 Manuelita Outside
As we enter the water, we immediately see five large hammerheads. This dive is a little murkier than the two previous dives. The images can't be captured by camera in this kind of backscatter, but they will still be taken home and remembered.
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November 22, 2006
The Dives : Dirty Rock / Punta Maria / Isla Pajara
 This morning we are feeling the results of a hurricane in Mexico. The Sea Hunter is once again rocking and visibility is low due to the northerly swells. The dive, however, is spectacular. It starts with several hammerheads. Then around 80 ft. we are joined by four marble rays who are not intimidated at all and stay with us for 10 minutes. After a brief visit from a small devil ray, the largest school of big eye jacks I've ever seen engulfs us. I went into the center of the school until there was no sky, no bottom, no blue, just jacks. I was one of them for an instant.
At Punta Maria we sighted a big Galapagos shark when we descended. The swells out of the north more or less washed out this dive. The water was very silty and there was a pretty solid current with an accompanying surge.
After lunch, the salon becomes a busy hive of activity. Seth is enscounced on one couch with the still catalog, plugging away at the captions and cross-references. Jonathan is a fixture on another couch. He has become the master video clipper, at one point working on two computers at once. Amazing! Judith is set up in the dining room turning out notecards, written in her beautiful handwriting. Elaine is conferencing with Judy developing new ideas for upcoming newsletters.
After dinner we have a brainstorming session to help the team understand the whys and wherefores of their assignments and the structure of the Imaging Foundation newsletter and what, if anything, can be added or improved. Each team member relays how they came to be on this expedition, what it means to them and what they would like to see from the IF archives. e.g., bait ball films. It is a good bonding session.
Today it became apparent that the expedition's 'rhythm' has been established. Everyone is busily moving from diving to duties and back again.The enthusiasm is visible and contagious.
 The engines fired up at 6:00 AM this morning. We are moving, in a light rain, from Chatham Bay in the north to Yglesias Bay in the south, in hopes of evading the hurricane-generated seas.
The Dives: Alcyone / Submerged Rock / Manuelita Outside
This morning several dolphins welcomed us to Alcyone. This seamount was discovered by Jacque Cousteau and named after his ship. Today's highlights included hammerheads, tuna, octopus, black tip reef shark, lobsters, jacks, grunts, and an uncharacteristic absence of white tips.
Before returning to the ship, Captain Chris, who was leading our dive today, had the skiff pull near shore to show us a series of cuts in the cliffs that form prehistoric grottos with stark black walls contrasting with the deep turquoise water. As we headed back to the Sea Hunter, we were looking at the bay, valley and waterfall that inspired the opening sequence of Jurassic  Park. The beauty and primitive power of this island is beyond description. Traveling in the skiff to and from dives, we are dwarfed by the massive 300 ft. rock face peppered with waterfalls in every direction. On our way to the last dive, Jim was looking at the cliffs and said "I can't believe I've seen 15 waterfalls in the last 3 minutes".
Submerged Rock was a spectacular dive; there was a swim-through so full of snappers that you could barely see the other side. Many small holes contained juvenile octopus, lobster or starfish. Marble rays patrolled the perimeter of the dive, oblivious to our noisy bubbles, unlike the elusive hammerheads. We watched a group of white tips hunting. The phrase 'feeding frenzy' is putting it politely.
Up anchor and back to Chatham Bay...................
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Kerstin's Bird
Georgienne and Jay rescued a black noddy tern from the water this afternoon and put him in a corner to rest. Kerstin started to talk to him and he perched on her leg. The two of them sat together for a good part of the afternoon. She put him in one of the camera workspaces for the night with a little food. We are all hoping he'll make it.
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Baitball Seminar
Georgienne introduced one of their productions called Baitball Bonanza. I saw this at a Chicago scuba show a few years ago. Georgienne, Jay and Stan Waterman did a joint presentation. It was then that I decided to come to Cocos Island. It is the quintessential film about baitballs, and as far as I know, the only one to be filmed from the inside.
November 24, 2006
We checked on the bird this morning. He had made it through the night in his little workspace.
The Dives:
DirtyRock/Alcyone/Silverado/Manuelita Inside(Night Dive)
 Dirty Rock had plenty of hammerheads today. The visibility was still poor, but it didn't take anything away from the excitement. A lone dolphin passed through us at the end of the dive.
Alcyone was a wall of hammerheads. There must have been 50 of them.
Silverado was very silted out, but had 2 huge silvertips being cleaned for almost the whole dive.
The night dive at Manuelita Inside is one of the most unique dives in the world. The whitetips hunt for prey in the rocks. It was like a carpet of 150 sharks, so closely packed together you could hardly see the bottom. It was violent and exciting, and almost surreal with all the dive lights panning back and forth in a frenzy of their own.
Update: Kerstin's Bird
I was working in the galley when Kerstin came in very excited. The tern hadn't made any attempt to fly by mid-morning, so she took him to the bow of the ship. Upon feeling the wind in his face and seeing other birds, he opened his wings and was gone.
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Podcast Project
This evening Georgienne and Toby did a joint presentation of a Podcast that they are working on for distribution to 3rd Graders. A Podcast is a short video for download to an Ipod or a computer. A whitetip speaks to the students about what its like to be a shark and what part the shark plays in a healthy ecosystem. The underlying message is the need for protected areas large enough to ensure, not just survival, but propagation. The example used in the Podcast is the need to protect the Galapagos and Cocos, which can't be done without also protecting the connecting corridor between them, allowing harassment free migration. The initial rough cut was shown to the volunteers. A critique session followed. Several new ideas for the podcast were suggested by team members. Back to the drawing board to incorporate these suggestions. The podcast will progress as the week wears on.
November 25, 2006
The Dives : Dos Amigos Pequeno / Dos Amigos Grande / Viking Rock
 Dos Amigos Grande had a massive swim-through with holes in the ceiling filled with lobsters. There were barberfish at the pinnacle of the archway who, not being subject to rules, or for that matter gravity, were all upside down. apparently their underside goes on the rock, no matter the rock's position. I turned upside down myseslf to see the world from their point of view. We returned from the third dive exhilarated and tired. My favorite part returning to the ship from a dive is that Loyal is always there to greet us with a big smile. While we are diving, he stands watch on the upper deck. Binoculars in hand, he is on "baitball watch", scanning the waters for sign of baitball activity that we might be able to see up close. As we approach, he waves us in, asks how it went, asks what we saw, and did we get any good pictures.
Talina
After dinner we had a presentation on Cocos Island biosystems by Talina Konotchick. She has joined us from the research vessel, Argos, part of the Undersea Hunter Group, which is moored next to Manuelita Island. She has been diving with us the past few days. Talina is in her 2nd year of a PHD program at the Scripps Institute. This morning she was in the Argos submersible and told us what it was like, and what she saw at 900 feet below sea level. Of course, everyone was very interested. We all share beliefs that lie along parallel paths. These biosystems need to be saved through research and education. And imaging is one of the most powerful tools in the educational arsenal.
November 26, 2006
 The Dives: Alcyone / Dirty Rock / Manuelita Outside
This morning at Alcyone there was, as usual, a lot of hammerheads. One in particular was swaying back and forth apparently engrossed in the cleaning from an angelfish. Jim swam over and surprisingly it did not pay any attention to him. I've never seen a diver that close to a normally skittish hammerhead. I'll bet he got some great pictures. The next dive was a blue water dive and we were lucky enough to encounter hammerheads that happened to cross our paths.
A manta ray ended the last dive of the day.
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The Beach Trip (By Elaine Green)
Today after lunch and before the afternoon dive, several of us hopped into a skiff and motored over to the shore. There are only two places where we could go ashore on the island. Here over the years, a path in the rocks has been cleared so that a small boat can be brought close to shore in high tide. There are three waterfalls visible from this small stretch of shore. It's clear that over the centuries many people have landed at this place. Long ago seamen began carving their names and the date they were here into the soft rocks that are on the beach. The oldest is dated 1839 and the most recognizable for us in the 21 st century is Phillipe Cousteau dated 1987.
The island is completely covered in trees and a very aggressive vine. There is even some grass in the few places where sunshine hits the ground. Mango trees border the streams. The reason there are more than 300 waterfalls on this small island is that it's just a pointed rock and rain has to have some way down the hill.
There are two ranger stations on the island, and rangers are present at them all the time. However, Cocos is still considered uninhabited because this is not the rangers' home; it's just the place where they work. Rangers will stay on the island for a month before they get two weeks at home. One ranger is here at the Chatham Bay station. His duties are to cook for the other rangers and to write reports. The other rangers patrol the island to ensure the fishermen are not violating the 12-mile fishing restriction and to keep the shoreline clean.
The path up the mountain is very steep, winding and somewhat slippery. The Island at its highest point is 600 meters high. It is a great view from up top because at that height the birds are flying below you.
E.G. |
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November 27, 2006
The Dives: Dirty Rock / Alcyone / Manuelita Outside
 This is the last dive day. Although we've just had 7 days of exciting and challenging diving, the most common thing I heard this morning was; "Where did the time go?"
I think Alcyone may have been the favorite dive site for most of us. While we would see hammerheads on almost every site, Alcyone, at least for this trip, always had a continuous parade of cleaning activity from the start to the finish of the dive.
The last dive at Manuelita Outside was a great finish. There were hammerheads and 3 separate sightings of manta rays. It finished as a slow, leisurely drift dive in blue water. In the last couple of minutes an endless school of jacks passed through us, turned and passed again. We spent our last underwater minutes of the trip inside the school. It was a fitting farewell.
During the next couple of hours the crew of Sea Hunter was slightly busy. The close of a normal dive trip entails emptying the skiffs of dive rigs, photographic gear, weights, tanks and personal belongings. The skiffs have to be hoisted by crane into their cradles for the crossing back to Puntarenas. The skiff docking gear, fenders and lines must be dismantled. This crossing, however, is different. The Undersea Hunter Group purchased the Argos several months ago and she is on her way to Panama for a major refitting. So, the deep-sea submersible, its support equipment and most of Argos' crew are on board for the passage to Puntarenas.
As the sun was setting on our stern, almost on cue, a pod of dolphins appeared on the bow and played in the pressure wave to compliment our last glimpse of Cocos Island and start us on the crossing.
November 28, 2006
 This morning is a bright sunny day with seas like glass. There are flying fish everywhere, able to achieve long distances because there are no waves or swells. A sailfish breaches six times across the bow in a display that couldn't be choreographed by the most accomplished film maker.
Around 11 AM we had 5 or 6 large bottlenose dolphins that rode our bow wake for over an hour. The entire cast of crew and guests emerged to watch.
The rest of the glorious sunny day and 1/2 is devoted to packing and drying dive gear and finishing up the assigned tasks. In the late afternoon, Georgienne and the task leaders gave a wrap-up presentation. Things went well this trip for the tasks. The still catalog task was finished. Seth, with help from Richard, finished this task with time to spare. Great strides were made in the video clipping task. Jonathan got this new system well on its way. The podcast production has gone through several revisions. We were shown the current production, and it looks great. It's now just awaiting final voice-over that will be done back in LA. The podcast was also produced in Spanish. Jose provided that voice-over and did a great job. Over 300 note cards were written and addressed. In this new computer age, we have forgotten the time involved in hand writing notes. This was an amazing accomplishment. Jobs well done!
November 29, 2006
Puntarenas is a mad scene of good-byes, luggage, and promises. As we board the bus for the return trip to San Jose, I turn to look at the Sea Hunter and reflect on all that I have seen from her decks in the last 10 days. There is no remorse, however, because........ I'll be back.
Mike Coughlin - 11/29/06
* Journal photo illustrations are courtesy of our expedition volunteers and are not part of our professional database. |
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