Cozumel Dive Vacations

One of the world’s best diving spots

A giant green moray slips through the waters, like an olive streamer weaving through a gentle breeze. The two-meter eel suddenly darts off like a harpoon, its hungry mouth snapping at an unlucky fish - its next meal. A large turtle glides through the warm Cozumel waters, propelled through the current by its stubby appendages.

Coral formations, a garden smattered with yellows, reds, greens and browns, rise from the blue depths to provide a haven for equally colorful marine life. A lobster, claws typing at the sandy ocean floor, cowers inside a crack in this living rock. There’s heavenly angelfish the size of plates, parrotfish with rainbow scales, meter-long barracudas and colorful grunts like you’ve never seen before.

Cozumel is an underwater heaven that lives up to, perhaps exceeds, its reputation as one of the world’s top dive spots.

Just ask Bill Horn, owner of one of Cozumel’s oldest dive operations. “We’ve got it all here, we’re very fortunate,” says Horn, of Aquasafari www.aquasafari.com “Here we have Cozumel Island protecting the reef and we have a gulf stream to feed it, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

It also makes it one of the best - and most accessible - places in the world for diving. “Cozumel’s accessible and there are very few inaccessible areas that are any better,” Horn says. “You can pay twice as much elsewhere and not get as good a diving.”

What makes Mexico’s Cozumel Island a success, Horn says, is the variety. “You could go to the Orient and it’s the same fish painted different.” The 45-year-old has dove in Cozumel for more than two decades, and its beauty convinced him to leave Mexico City for this island paradise and join Aquasafari.

Horn still has a photo of the original shop in his office: A rudimentary shelter at the foot of the pier, powder blue paint chipping off meter-thick stone walls. It’s a far cry from his modern facilities downtown Cozumel’s Hotel Safari Inn or his other shop at the swank Plaza Las Glorias. When Horn joined Aquasafari in 1978 it was one of three dive shops on Cozumel. Today, there are more than 100 dive shops to serve the thousands making the pilgrimage to this Caribbean hotspot each year.

Cozumel - an island 53 kilometers long and 14 km wide - became a diver’s haven after undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau discovered the island’s incredible marine life in the 1960s. Cozumel’s reefs stretch along the island’s west side, at the edge of a 19-km channel separating this island from Mexico’s mainland. A strong northern current through this channel provides nutrients for the abundant marine life, crystal clear water and perfect dive conditions.

Today, dive operators can treat visitors to an incredible variety: Dives along the famous Palancar reef, undersea adventures through caverns, shallow dives teeming with marine life, or deeper dives into undersea coral ravines and walls. All Cozumel dives are drift-dives, where the current carries you gently along this spectacular undersea world.

Almost all dives are by boat, although you can do some shallow shore dives (or snorkeling) at Chankanab Bay, nine kilometers south of Cozumel’s only city, San Miguel de Cozumel, or even farther south at San Francisco and Palancar beaches.

It’s not hard to understand Cozumel’s lure to divers. The visibility ranges from 50 to 70 meters, while water temperatures of 24 C mean you’ll never need anything more than a short wetsuit to be comfortable in any Cozumel dive. I did three exceptional dives while visiting Cozumel. The five-kilometer Palancar Reef on the southwest Cozumel was a deep dive with spectacular coral canyons and walls covered with life hundreds of years old.

The shallower Yucab Reef had by far the best marine life: Everything from menacing looking barracudas and speckled angel fish to sea turtles and lobsters can be seen among the reef formations in 13 to 16 meters depth. An afternoon dive at Paradise Reef, just south of San Miguel’s cruise ship dock, was a pleasant dive with a flat, sandy bottom at 13 meters and abundant sea life, including a graceful green moray eel and lobster.

Bill Horn has one piece of advice for readers considering a dive trip to Cozumel. “Leave your drysuits at home.”

Author: Doug Alexander and Diego Pereyra Trama