Oceans

It's been BLUUUUUE water in Quepos for a few weeks, so the time has come to check out what bits and pieces have been dropped or thrown off the pier. All of the Divmasters, Instructors and a few of our dive buddies packed up dive gear, gloves and knives for our underwater mission. You never quite know what you are going to find, and more often then not there will be a lot of fish hooks involved!! We spilt up into buddy teams and each took a different area of the port to search. Quepos has an enourmous pier, much bigger than little Quepos would seem to need. The pier is about 100m long and 10m wide and is a relic from the banana exportation days back in the 50's! (luckily the pier was renovated this ... read more

2 days after christmas one could be known to have the christmas blues...more so if you have a cold and you cant dive...especially when the water is BEAUTIFUL! But at 5:30am I sprang out of bed knowing that I was heading to Cano Island!! Cano is about 2 hours to the south by boat from Quepos and is famous for its’ marine park for diving and snorkeling, and also for the pre colombian indian giant stone spheres found there. We had a mixed group of divers and snorkelers and we left the dock just after 7 and were at the island jumping in the aquamarine waters by 9am. I was taking the snorkelers...not being able to dive, and the group had never been snorkeling before! They attentively listened to briefings and we blew up our snorkel ... read more

Oceans Unlimited has been bringing diving to the central pacific coast of Costa Rica for around 5 years now diving and teaching as many people as possible the joys of scuba. As this is a coastal town there are people here that have been diving for a long time yet have never had the chance to get certified. For this reason PADI offers the experienced diver program and this week we have been using this certification to get our local divers certified! As they already have been diving frequently after a quick review of the final exam, we headed up to the local pool for some skills. Due to the cloudy, cooler days recently, the pool was definately on the chilly side! Skill session went really well with the guys in the pool despite wearing a ... read more

Beautiful morning yesterday...and yes we are in October! With myself and dastardly Drew guiding, we set off into Manuel Antonio Park to find out what delights it had to offer us today. Our first dive around long island we opted for peaceful, relaxing as most dives should be to get everyones feet wet slowly! The first dive was pretty quiet . with some nice puffers, a small ray and lots of reef fish. During the interval we relaxed and decided to head over to one of the more adventurous sites " Geos' Ridge" named after yours truly ; ) ( it was that or name it after the pooch!!) A series of ridges running out of Oluhuita in the park, there is always large schools of fish and often some large encounters as well. ON drop ... read more

Advanced class, dives on the schedule Deep and photography. Deep up first, played around with our colour changes down at 95 ft and then made a nice multi level dive, watched some snapper and jacks before hitting the surface. Dive number 2 was supposed to be a first taster of underwater photography for my students. As an avid photographer myself its definately one of my favorite specialtys to teach. Underwater photography is so very different from photography on land. Whilst the fundamentals remain the same you have to deal with controlling your buoyancy as well as focusing on your subject! We had a nice slow descent but as soon as we were on the bottom I thought that i was hearing some strange noises in the background. %minutes in they grew until we were listening to ... read more

Day 1 of the PADI Instructor Deveopment Course (IDC) begins. New Instructors here we go! On a bright and sunny day everyone sat down with their loaded crewpacks and materials looking through the schedule with anticipation about what is to come. Assignments were handed out intros made and the day was rounded out with a well done skill circuit. Lesson learnt: Don't confuse a DIVE ALERT with an inflator (ouch!) Day 2 After a full day in the classroom, interaction was the key. Morning was spent preparing knowledge presentation and discussing Discover Scuba Diving followed by Confined water discussions in the afternoon. After spending the first day outside, Damien decided that he would prefer the air conditioning and managed to figure out how to open the new doors by pushing his nose at the right angle. ... read more

We were in our surface interval just finished a dive and were checking out a new site that we had found just a couple days before called "Sitting Bull" when Bob, who was captaining that day, shouted down that he could see something in the water...a BIG shadow. Everybody shifted to one side of the boat and I jumped up to the captains tower to get a better view. And then I was it..the first Manta of the season. He was about 10 meters from the boat and only a couple feet from the surface, the was hanging just above a rocky drop off and he suddenly moved to dart away and his wing tips broke the surface. Everybody sighed at the beautiful manta moment and turned away to finish setting up equipment for the next ... read more