Snorkel tour boat
We had an early breakfast in order to leave on the boat at 7:15 for our snorkeling tour to Caño Island. We wondered how they were going to get all the people on the boat, and they weren’t. We were asked to go on a differerent boat, and at first we were annoyed because it was a dive boat, and we thought we might have to wait for the divers to snorkel.
But as it turned out it was a good day. Because there were less people snorkeling on our boat we had less interference and were able to get in two good sessions. As well on the way to the island we saw a lot of spotted dolphins feeding.
Small reef fish
In the first session we saw a lot of small fish, especially a lot of Sergeant Majors. We also did see a large green sea turtle, and a white tipped reef shark, and quite a lot of red snapper.
After that we went on shore for a while, and some people that didn’t want to snorkel stayed behind to walk on the island. We did see some tourists that had an unfortunate experience. An older couple than us, the man must have fallen getting off the boat, as he was soaked, but worse, so was his entire pack that he was carrying, including at least two cameras. One was a point and shoot, but the other was a quality camera with a second telephoto lens. We saw them trying to clean them off, but from my experience with cameras and water they had a really disastrous experience.
Schooling Jack
For the second snorkeling session only three of us went out. After we’d dropped the divers our guide took us towards shore, and we swam for a long way, but it was too deep to see anything. So he had the boat pick us up and took us to a shallower spot where we saw a lot of fish. Most interesting was a huge school of jack. There were thousands of schooling fish milling below us. We also saw a lot of smaller reef fish.
There is virtually no coral here, and the water is not very clear. Because it is so deep it isn’t the best snorkeling we’ve done, but there certainly were a huge number of fish. I managed to get the tops of my toes badly blistered in the fins. I guess they were rubbing on the top, or perhaps I got some sand in the boots.
After finishing snorkeling we headed in to a beach on the Osa peninsula. It was a beautiful beach, and we ate lunch there before returning to the hote.