Scuba Diving Fishing Land Rafting Xtreme Adventures Things 2DO

What The Pros Say

Paul kvinta

Riding the Caño Carousel

We creep over a volcanic ridge and spy the neighborhood heavies below, whitetip reef sharks, a half-dozen of them, patrolling the sandy bottom and keeping the locals in line. We're 60 feet down, exploring a site called El Barco, "The Boat," a curious name, since there's no wreck amid this patchy sprawl of boulders, just a lineup of tough guys. The green morays are especially quick to flash their bridgework when we edge close to their dens in the coral. Ditto the zebra eels. On our safety stop, a tornado of hefty barracudas swirls around us, hundreds of them, all canines and cuspids.

Surfacing, we find our bearings by locating Caño Island, the focal point for divers coming to Osa. This dreamy dollop of jungle and sand 11 miles west of the peninsula attracts a profusion of marine life, including monster schools of fish, patrolling sharks and rays, eels and the resident rock stars--pilot whales, false killer whales and five species of dolphin. Caño is also the world's only calving ground for two different migrations of humpbacks.

After El Barco, we putter out to Bajo del Diablo, "Depth of the Devil," Caño's premier site. With a pair of towering, 150-foot pinnacles and a canyon in between, as well as intricate mazes of peaks and valleys to the east, west and south, Diablo is actually four or five sites in one.

We plunk down 70 feet into the canyon, and, almost immediately, a powerful current launches us on something resembling a drift dive. A blur of color sweeps by my mask: Yellow and blue cup corals, green and pink sea fans and cottony-white gorgonians, all of it splashed across rocks, walls, ledges and cliffs. We fly over a riot of reef-hugging creatures, yellowtail damsels and rainbow wrasses, barberfish, hawkfish, flag groupers and king angels. A sudden thermocline reduces the 79-degree water seven or eight clicks. We round a corner, and finally, the current wanes. I slow down, get oriented. We then rise slowly through the water column, past swarming schools of Pacific creoles, past two- and three-foot-long amberjacks, real fatties, lumbering through side channels. Atop the column, a wild, silvery twister descends on us, a force much larger than the barracuda whirlwind at El Barco. Hundreds of big-eye jacks, maybe thousands, swoosh round and round us, faster and faster, like a carnival ride gone berserk. We can't get off.