Hola divers!

This is Karie again writing from Costa Rica and hoping every one had a great summer! As with the end of every summer it is sad but then we start to think of all the fun times and people we met and it becomes happy time again! Here is a little about our summer season here in Costa Rica.

Well, first of all its actually the beginning of our rainy season, but July-August is a great time to come down since we get just the right amount of sun and rain to make the area beautiful! The mountains are green, streams are flowing, weather is bright and cheerful in the morning and early afternoon and then we get a nice, relaxing rain shower at the end of the day to cool things down. It’s a great time of year!

With all this good weather we have had some awesome dives! Water temperatures and visibility were AMAZING in the beginning of August and customers are still having amazing dives every day! We have had several boat trips out to the Catalina’s Island and although it is not manta season the divers have come back happy and cant stop commenting how good the dives were. We have been seeing different types of rays, eels, turtles, octopuses and MORE! On the way back from Catalina’s the divers reported seeing dolphins and even a momma humpback whale and her calf. It can’t get much better than that!

So far we have had one boat go out to the Bat Islands and the divers came back glowing after having seen some bull sharks. The Bat islands can be funny, sometimes we see lots of sharks and sometimes all we see is plankton. I guess it just has to be your lucky day. As we say here, you may not see them but they sure saw you.

As with every good and exciting time you have bad times as well. Our big boat the Giorgiana broke down a few weeks ago. We are looking for the part and hope to get it fixed and back to work in no time! In the meantime we are repainting the benches, making huge repairs and hopefully this time next month I will be posting pictures of our new looking boat the Giorgiana.

 Our good friend Marci came down early this month and with her came Bobbie Jo’s new underwater camera! So far it has gone down 2 times and we have taken many great shots! Bobbie Jo is ecstatic to finally have an underwater camera and can’t wait to get the hang of it. Its small and user friendly so it’s a perfect camera to just tuck in to your BCD and take out when you come across something really cool.

The first day we used the camera we went out to a new dive site called Mango. It was beautiful there! It was a fun trip so we all had fun goofing around in the water. We saw lots of eels, scorpion fish and lots of butterfly barber fish. On the surface interval we went to Playa Huevos and there was this cute little raccoon hunting for crabs in the sand. He was not shy and did not mind us watching him. There were several turtle tracks on the beach as well, with luck soon some little turtles will be making their way to the ocean for the first time!

 We have had the pleasure of spending time with and being part of several families and couples vacation this year. I hope you all had as much fun as we did and thank you for choosing Diving Safaris and we hope to see you again next year!

We have had lots of students this month, Its great to see people and hear about peoples first time underwater. Some like it, others don’t but for those who do, their face just lights up and they cant get enough of it!

On the 22nd we had a big BBQ with our employees and some friends. It was a lot of fun and brought back a lot of memories.

Well that’s it for this month’s newsletter, I hope you enjoyed reading it and stay toned for next months!

Karie