Bocas Del Toro is a very chill town, and Bocas Diving Pirates is a very chill dive shop. Chill but professional, don’t let the laid back vibe fool you, these guys are good, real good and they work hard. You don’t have to touch your gear unless you want to. The instruction quality is also excellent. I was listening to el jefe Alex instruct new divers before a DSD and everything was on point, precise, yet humorous. This is not the kind of shop where they “forget” to ask for your certification card or where the DMs dive by intuition rather than by decompression tables. Oxygen rescue kit on every dive, not something we’ve seen very often on our travels. The crew was super nice and quickly made us feel like part of the team, besides Alex, we got to know Omar, our DM Charlie and our groovin’ dancin’ boat stearin’ captain Bernardino. That’s one reason I prefer smaller dive shops, you get to make connections with people (provided you’re not a jackass to start with), and that takes the diving to a different level. You get to know the DM(s) and they get to know you and how you dive.

Bocas del Toro is primarily known as a surf town, and rightly so, it has the most fearsome wave in Panama, the terrifying Silverback, and a bunch of beaches around it have waves for every level of surfer. What is less known is that there is also some very good diving to be had.

Diving with the Pirates a couple of days? Leave all your gear there so you don’t have to lug it around town.

The Pacific coast is renowned for the big stuff, sharks, whale sharks and so on. The Caribbean side of Panama much less so, it’s more about all kinds of corals, shrimps, fireworms and nudibranches. This maybe so in general but we still encountered a big school of rays, a very large nurse shark and… a manta ray. In all our years diving it’s only the third we’ve seen. Apparently the dolplhins that jumped across our bow weren’t told that this was small stuff territory either. It’s what you get when you bring positive energy to a dive, as Alex and Charlie are fond of saying.

The ecosystem in Bocas is by and large healthy, in some spots the corals are simply splendid with a variety of shapes and colours we’ve rarely seen. Stop a few minutes over a cluster of tube sponges or brain corals and you’ll start spotting the cleaning shrimp, the hermit crabs, the brittle sea stars, the toadfishes and the spotted drums. Bocas is a place to dive and pay attention, you might get lucky and spot a mantis shrimp or one of the many caballitos that live among the reef.

By the way, it’s official, we are getting a better underwater camera, the gopro works well for video, but pics, well, a little meh. Still, just for fun:

There are also a few small but entertaining wrecks to check out. Shipwreck, a sunken car ferry that was especially interesting as a night dive, and Catamaran, which is, you guessed it, a sunken catamaran.

In general the dives are pretty shallow, which means you can get some serious bottom time going. 81 minutes in one case. That was nice.

The swell prevented us from diving Polo,  a series of caverns and canyons we were looking forward to, but we did make it out to 14 other fun sites, no boredom here. Our first dives were to Tiger Rock, in the middle of the ocean (or so it felt), two underwater rocky pillars that you can dive around and are very differents from  the dives you’ll do in the bay. When the weather cooperates there’s a cool variety of diving to be had in Bocas.

I’ve mentioned his before, how every place seems to have a totem creature, nurse sharks in Belize, trumpet fish in Curaçao, well if we had to pick one for Bocas it would be the arrow crab, they were big and all over the place. You see them feeding with their purple pincers, and their down turned mouths seems to say they’re tired of eating always the same food.

And since Bocas is a surfer town, a young peolpe town, there’s always a place to fill out your logbooks after a dive and get rehydrated.

We are off to Panama City and its old district, the Casco Viejo in a bit. One hour flight by propeller plane. The diving is done for this trip. Videos and more pics shortly.

Be well friends.