December divers dropping down in Costa Rica might decide to check out both of the rich coasts. Conditions during this month change fast. Last week is no predictor for this week. While sweet conditions on both coasts are hard to forecast, December often does it for divers. Big waves and rain are restocking the reefs of the South Caribbean after the dry season’s usual underwater hunting free for all.
The reefs in and surrounding Cahuita National Park and the Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge are often picked clean after two months of summer and clear, calm seas in September and October.
November’s wind, waves and current stirs the sea and brings life up from deeper and distant reefs. If the Caribbean lays down for a few days or a week in December, the water can turn clear and blue overnight. This is the time for the best chance to see some of the bigger residents of this marine world.
After a month’s winter of waves, the reef life blooms like a sunny spring. The holes are full of lobster, the crevasses full of jack. Sharks, dolphins and mackerel come for the feast. Human hunters show up the first day the water is clear enough to see a meal. They begin to clean out the shelves of the reef-like shoppers at a supermarket.
Luckily, in December, a session of waves in never too long to wait. And when the swell kicks in, divers wait on the beach while Mother Nature restocks the shelves.
Costa Rica’s Pacific coast is also worth a visit for diving in December. From the Bat Islands in Guanacaste’s Santa Rosa National Park in the North to Cano Island Biological Reserve in the south, summer has kicked in early.
Sunny skies light up every dive as the dry season sets in. A warming of the eastern tropical Pacific, also known as an El Niño, is apparently beginning to affect the world’s weather and this means extremely clear water for Pacific divers due to dangerously dry forests and rivers on the left coast.
During the last El Niño, Costa Rica’s Pacific became as clear as most locals could remember. While amazing vistas of underwater sites opened up, marine life thinned out greatly.
Sea life, apparently, prefers La Niña and her cooler waters to the bathtub warm of El Niño. A long-lasting El Niño would bleach corals a bone white as they lose the symbiotic algae that gives them their color. Reefs with out their algae are in grave danger. Previous Niños have already destroyed the most spectacular reefs of Cocos Island National Park. So this might be the time to check out Pacific diving before the sights evolve over this next dry season.
December is also the time when the northern hemisphere’s marine mammals show up for a tropical winter. The most famous is the humpback whales that arrive to give birth, court and mate.
Many others pop up around the solstice, including Pseudorcas, Bottlenose Dolphins and Fin Whales. These great beasts might be seen all over the Pacific coast with Caño Island Biological Reserve being the hotspot. Make sure you show the animals and reefs and waters the respect they deserve and need to survive. Ask your guides or clients to do the same.
Let the big stuff come to you, just look at the little things and insure that you and your hotel or home put trash and waste where it belongs.
As usual now is the time to go diving in Costa Rica. E-mail costacetacea@hotmail.com for information, or with contributions to the report.
