CoCo View Resort
We have now been to Cocoview three times. For us, like many others it seems, it's an easy place to meet up with old diving friends and get masses of underwater time in the most relaxing way possible. We love to be left to our own devices in the water so that we can spend as much or as little time on a photo subject as we wish. Cocoview is the perfect place for this. The second boat dives, both morning and afternoon, are 'drop off' dives, where the boat drops you at your chosen spot and you make your own way underwater, back to the resort in your own time. But for me, the best feature of all is that at any time of day or night, you can grab a tank and make your own way out to the house reef (or the interesting wreck right in front of the resort) even if you have no dive buddy. There is masses to see in the shallows, and I have been known to spend two and a half hours underwater (thank goodness for Nitrox) not far from the resort playing around with different settings on the huge variety of macro subjects.
We have only good things to say about the resort itself - the rooms are great, the food is very good, the bar is fun and the staff are helpful and friendly. The same can be said about the diving facilities - there is even a new camera room now for the serious photographers and the dive crews are wonderful. But for me, the real reason to go is for the never ending supply of new photo subjects.
You can spend hours watching the numerous jawfish, waiting for the perfect shot of them aerating their (mouth incubated) eggs or with the sergeant majors as they tend their patches of purple eggs on the remains of the plane wreck nearby. There are always many different juveniles, from drumfish, to filefish and angelfish. The rocks are full of blennies and you can find pikeblennies and sailfin blennies in the sand. In a week of diving, you'd be sure to see turtles, morays, octopus and reef squid and the hard and soft corals are beautiful in the sunlit shallows. It's a great place for watching out for interesting behavior too, as you can take the time to look, especially around the reef at night. It could well be the best biodiversity in the Caribbean from our experiences, so I'm sure we'll head back there again soon.
