July 31 – August 11, 2024 | Cocos Island Trip Report | Sea Hunter

We’re just back from another UNFORGETTABLE voyage to Cocos Island!

Dos Amigos Pequeño emerged as one of our top dive sites this week, bustling with Galapagos sharks at the cleaning station, and blacktip sharks continuously streaming in throughout our dive. The spectacle was heightened by the sight of hammerheads—both single file and in massive schools—as we drifted into the blue. It was nothing short of amazing! On another dive there later in the week, we again saw nonstop sharks on the entire time. At first there was some challenging current, but as we dropped down onto the site it calmed down and Galapagos sharks started filing into the cleaning station without pause! (Plus hammerheads and blacktips as well.) At one point  our guide counted 15 Galapagos sharks in his range of sight at a time. They were super curious and coming in super close, as close as 2ft away at times!!  After spending some time with a small school of hammerheads during the safety stop, we wrapped up the dive with huge smiles all around.

At Dos Amigos Grande we saw large schools of fish, and a group of about 10+ hammerheads that passed close to the group. We also encountered a Galapagos shark, a silvertip and a beautiful octopus. On one of our afternoon adventures to Pajara we came across many whitetip reef sharks, a frogfish and a mantis shrimp, among other macro creatures.

Alcyone gave us some phenomenal dives: we saw hammerheads, Galapagos, silvertips and silkies…also a couple of big yellowfin tunas passing really close and slow.

We had some AMAZING dives at Manuelita Outside, including what one of our guides described as the dive of a lifetime! We saw the school of hammerheads passing from the cleaning station, first along the sandy bottom and then on the cleaning stations. We had hammerheads nonstop throughout the dive! A tiger shark appeared, and as we drifted into the blue we found a huge school of hammerheads that came in super close to the group. There was a lot of fish activity, a few big schools of different kinds of fish (big eyed jacks, snappers and others), and to top it off we found a small group of eagle rays! 

This we we got to try out a relatively new dive site called Punta Porites. What an amazing and unexpected dive! The group saw a tiger shark incredibly close up, and it stuck around for a while. Then we came across a giant oceanic manta ray passing over incredibly close as well, followed by a couple of frogfish together (really big ones!). Later, we saw a group of three very curious silver tip sharks turning around a rock and coming super close to the group. Then we encountered a devil ray, a Galapagos shark and at the very end three wahoos that were very curious! 

We had some fun dives at Manuelita Coral Garden, including one where we spotted an octopus fighting with a damsel fish (our divemaster believes the octopus was eating the fish’s eggs). We also saw hammerheads there, both in the cleaning stations single file as well as small schools of them swimming over the reef, and a group of whitetip reef sharks appearing to be getting ready to school up for a night hunt! Not to mention a yellow frogfish, and lots of bigeye jacks swimming about.