This report is in two parts. I talk about the diving here, and there's more about the liveaboard at ...
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/li...ing-malpelo-aboard-yemaya-ii.html#post6027170
Our trip started with a flight to Panama City, and a chartered bus ride the next morning to Puerto Mutis, a tiny port town deep in a mangrove estuary, four hours to the southwest. In mid-afternoon we boarded the two 25' fiberglass dive skiffs for a half-hour ride out to our liveaboard, anchored in deeper water. We motored out to the open sea and began a 6-hour crossing to Isla Coiba, a national park and world heritage site. We had the roughest crossing the captain had seen, wallowing through big seas and sheets of driving rain. We anchored for the night in the lee of Coiba, and awoke to the same conditions.
Coiba is reputed to be an excellent dive destination in good weather. It was humpback season there, and we saw a number of whales breaching, all in the distance. The schedule called for us to make a first warm-up dive there, then start the long crossing to Malpelo, but due to losing the anchor (yup, losing the anchor), we did three dives there under thick, low clouds, heavy rain, and five-foot chop, and spent a second night, as well as the following morning. Early in the morning following our second night at Coiba, we began the crossing to Malpelo, also the roughest crossing the crew could remember. The crossing used up that day, plus well into the night. The anchor travesty and crossing are included in my separate boat report here.
Malpelo ... it's interesting to speculate about what the trip could have been. You can fix some things, but bad viz is bad viz, and it's tough when you do a liveaboard that really requires decent visibility, and what you get are conditions that the dive guide had only seen once before
in four years. Over the course of the trip the weather improved greatly; the viz only marginally.
Malpelo is a barren, barely-a-mile-long rock, 230 miles out in the Pacific Ocean, south of Panama. It's actually Colombian territory , and is inhabited by a rotating group of a half-dozen Colombian soldiers and thousands of sea birds. It seems that, to Americans, it's the least-known, least-visited of the Pacific triad of pelagic stopovers, the others being Coco (often called "Cocos", which is actually in the Indian Ocean) and Galapagos. It's a much more popular trip for Europeans.
The seascape is rocky with barnacles and urchins, and not much else. One resident school of small barracuda, some jacks, leather bass, and snappers, the biggest concentration of morays I've ever seen in my life, and sharks ... lots of scalloped hammerheads and silky sharks, and the occasional Galapagos shark.
Lousy viz is good if you're a filter feeder ... we saw one manta out in the murk, and no whale sharks, though they're reputed to make an occasional appearance there. The visibility was bad down to the thermocline, which moved between 75' and 95'. Water temp above was 80-81F (27C), below that down to 66F (19C). That was also where the hammerheads, the ones we could see, liked to hang out ... in that oily-looking, distorted layer of visibility right at the thermocline. The dive plan was pretty regular ... eight of us and a dive guide back-rolling in, sometimes negative, and descending to a spot on the rocks where you just sort of found a place to back yourself in and wait. I was in a 5 mil wetsuit with a Pinnacle BioPly skin and a 2.5 mil vest under it, a 3 mil hood with a 3 mil beanie over it, plus gloves and booties. If I was moving it was "OK", but hanging out shark-watching, I was cold.
As an aside, the Colombian government imposes some rules on diving at Malpelo: Only one boat at a time can be moored at the island, all dives must be led by a divemaster, and there is no night diving. Whatever your thoughts are about these rules, that's what they are, so bear them in mind if you think about going there. Eight divers to a group proved to be no problem, as the terrain and type of diving allowed people to spread out; there was no clustering to look at a macro speck of protoplasm.
There are a half dozen or more pinnacles in two clusters off both ends of the island. The northern group, called the Three Musketeers, offered a nice dive called the Cathedral. One of the pinnacles has a vertical split in it that goes nearly to the surface, and is open to daylight on both ends. It's usually filled with a couple of schools of snappers, and exiting out the far end brought us to an area facing open ocean to the north. We were still plagued by bad viz here, but by simply swimming out toward open water beyond the pinnacle, we were "found" on two dives by the silkies, in a school that I estimated around 250 strong.
Whereas the hammerheads were shy and skittish, the silkies were bold and curious, but never threatening. At first we would see a pair, then a dozen, then a minute later we were literally surrounded by them, like we were in a big bowl made of sharks slowly circling around us, one golden eye in our direction, often no more than 6-8 feet away. They are truly beautiful animals. Without those two dives, I may have considered the trip a total bust. We felt fine in a group of nine, but I'm not sure I would have felt the same alone or in a single buddy pair. One Belgian woman, an experienced diver, was glued to the DM, but laughed about it afterwards.
There aren't a lot of productive dive sites around the island, and depending on the prevailing weather and/or currents, you may only be able to dive a few of them. We spent days rotating through three dive sites, and when the visibility isn't cooperating, that gets old real fast.
If this destination interests you, I guess the odds are with you in terms of weather and visibility. Just remember that it's a long, expensive boat ride if you get skunked. More about the boat and the ride here .....
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/li...ing-malpelo-aboard-yemaya-ii.html#post6027170
Our trip started with a flight to Panama City, and a chartered bus ride the next morning to Puerto Mutis, a tiny port town deep in a mangrove estuary, four hours to the southwest. In mid-afternoon we boarded the two 25' fiberglass dive skiffs for a half-hour ride out to our liveaboard, anchored in deeper water. We motored out to the open sea and began a 6-hour crossing to Isla Coiba, a national park and world heritage site. We had the roughest crossing the captain had seen, wallowing through big seas and sheets of driving rain. We anchored for the night in the lee of Coiba, and awoke to the same conditions.
Coiba is reputed to be an excellent dive destination in good weather. It was humpback season there, and we saw a number of whales breaching, all in the distance. The schedule called for us to make a first warm-up dive there, then start the long crossing to Malpelo, but due to losing the anchor (yup, losing the anchor), we did three dives there under thick, low clouds, heavy rain, and five-foot chop, and spent a second night, as well as the following morning. Early in the morning following our second night at Coiba, we began the crossing to Malpelo, also the roughest crossing the crew could remember. The crossing used up that day, plus well into the night. The anchor travesty and crossing are included in my separate boat report here.
Malpelo ... it's interesting to speculate about what the trip could have been. You can fix some things, but bad viz is bad viz, and it's tough when you do a liveaboard that really requires decent visibility, and what you get are conditions that the dive guide had only seen once before
in four years. Over the course of the trip the weather improved greatly; the viz only marginally.
Malpelo is a barren, barely-a-mile-long rock, 230 miles out in the Pacific Ocean, south of Panama. It's actually Colombian territory , and is inhabited by a rotating group of a half-dozen Colombian soldiers and thousands of sea birds. It seems that, to Americans, it's the least-known, least-visited of the Pacific triad of pelagic stopovers, the others being Coco (often called "Cocos", which is actually in the Indian Ocean) and Galapagos. It's a much more popular trip for Europeans.
The seascape is rocky with barnacles and urchins, and not much else. One resident school of small barracuda, some jacks, leather bass, and snappers, the biggest concentration of morays I've ever seen in my life, and sharks ... lots of scalloped hammerheads and silky sharks, and the occasional Galapagos shark.
Lousy viz is good if you're a filter feeder ... we saw one manta out in the murk, and no whale sharks, though they're reputed to make an occasional appearance there. The visibility was bad down to the thermocline, which moved between 75' and 95'. Water temp above was 80-81F (27C), below that down to 66F (19C). That was also where the hammerheads, the ones we could see, liked to hang out ... in that oily-looking, distorted layer of visibility right at the thermocline. The dive plan was pretty regular ... eight of us and a dive guide back-rolling in, sometimes negative, and descending to a spot on the rocks where you just sort of found a place to back yourself in and wait. I was in a 5 mil wetsuit with a Pinnacle BioPly skin and a 2.5 mil vest under it, a 3 mil hood with a 3 mil beanie over it, plus gloves and booties. If I was moving it was "OK", but hanging out shark-watching, I was cold.
As an aside, the Colombian government imposes some rules on diving at Malpelo: Only one boat at a time can be moored at the island, all dives must be led by a divemaster, and there is no night diving. Whatever your thoughts are about these rules, that's what they are, so bear them in mind if you think about going there. Eight divers to a group proved to be no problem, as the terrain and type of diving allowed people to spread out; there was no clustering to look at a macro speck of protoplasm.
There are a half dozen or more pinnacles in two clusters off both ends of the island. The northern group, called the Three Musketeers, offered a nice dive called the Cathedral. One of the pinnacles has a vertical split in it that goes nearly to the surface, and is open to daylight on both ends. It's usually filled with a couple of schools of snappers, and exiting out the far end brought us to an area facing open ocean to the north. We were still plagued by bad viz here, but by simply swimming out toward open water beyond the pinnacle, we were "found" on two dives by the silkies, in a school that I estimated around 250 strong.
Whereas the hammerheads were shy and skittish, the silkies were bold and curious, but never threatening. At first we would see a pair, then a dozen, then a minute later we were literally surrounded by them, like we were in a big bowl made of sharks slowly circling around us, one golden eye in our direction, often no more than 6-8 feet away. They are truly beautiful animals. Without those two dives, I may have considered the trip a total bust. We felt fine in a group of nine, but I'm not sure I would have felt the same alone or in a single buddy pair. One Belgian woman, an experienced diver, was glued to the DM, but laughed about it afterwards.
There aren't a lot of productive dive sites around the island, and depending on the prevailing weather and/or currents, you may only be able to dive a few of them. We spent days rotating through three dive sites, and when the visibility isn't cooperating, that gets old real fast.
If this destination interests you, I guess the odds are with you in terms of weather and visibility. Just remember that it's a long, expensive boat ride if you get skunked. More about the boat and the ride here .....
