Bocas Del Toro Diving

 Bocas Del Toro diving is renowned to be quite good in comparison to most other dive sites in Panama or Costa Rica. Therefore, like I mentionned in my last travel update post, Mathieu and I have decided to take the advanced open water certification course as soon as we reached Isla Colon. For only 175 USD, you get 5 adventure dives as well plus two free fun dives. Good deal, right?

You can choose some of the adventure dives among a list of available dives, but some others are mendatory for the certification. The dives we did were :

- Navigation dive (mendatory) : you learn how to use a compass underwater.

- Deep Dive (mendatory) : You go deeper than the open water certification limit of 18 metres. We went down to 27 meters!

- Peak Performance buoyancy dive : Allows you to control your buoyancy by breathing.

- Fish identification dive : We learned to recognize fish families and identifies more than 7 different species during the dive! We saw (and touched!) a jellyfish, starfishes, parrottfishes, butterflyfishes and a couple lobsters and tons more.

- Night dive : this is the dive I was the most apprehensive about. You basically go on a dive in the dark, with nothing else but a small flashlight to illuminate the sea's bottom. It was very exciting! Lots of fish only come out at night so we had tons to see.

Bocas Del Toro diving was great after all! The visibility, even though it was the rainy season, was pretty good most of the time and we saw tons of fish. The quality, however, is not necessarily comparable to Utila diving (which was out of this world), but I have to say that it was quite good nonetheless. After all of this, we are now certified advanced open water! I'm really glad we did this =)

We still have two fun dives to complete tomorrow and we intend on visiting the surronding islands by water taxi too. Our next destination is Panama City! We cannot wait to see the canal!

We also celebrated the Saint Jean Baptiste here in Panama! It was raining buckets, but we still enjoyed a couple drinks at an outdoor bar. (1$ beers, an electric 4$ Margarita and 8.95$ pitcher of Sangria) It was a quiet, but fun evening! Too bad we were the only travelers from Quebec there that night =)

Have you tried Bocas Del Toro diving or scuba diving in general? What did you think of it? What is your favorite diving spot? Tell me in the comments!