Coiba: Pacific Pinnacles off a Prison Island

Coiba National Park, Veraguas · Panama

Challenging8 daysNorth America~£1,100 est.

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Overview

Isla Coiba was Panama's penal colony for more than eighty years, and fear of it kept the fishing fleets away. When the prison closed in 2004 the country found itself with one of the largest protected marine areas in the eastern Pacific and reefs nobody had touched. You dive it from Santa Catalina, ninety minutes each way in an open boat with the swell on the beam. The sites are volcanic pinnacles and boulder fields, not coral gardens. Frijoles and Iglesia have whitetip reef sharks stacked like firewood under the ledges; Granito de Oro gives you turtles and a white-sand lunch stop; and on settled days the run out to Hannibal Bank puts hammerheads and mobulas in the blue. Humpbacks calve here from August to October and you hear them through your regulator long before you see them. The variable is water, not weather. Thermoclines slice through at 20C and visibility can drop from 25 metres to five in one descent, so bring a 5mm suit with a hood. The dry season from December to April gives the calmest crossings. Santa Catalina is a scruffy surf village with unreliable cash machines: carry dollars. Eight days with rooms, park fees and ten dives is about £1,100.