Dive season opens to modest bookings as reef anxiety persists

The autumn dive season is underway in Costa Mar, but hotel occupancy in Puerto Azul and the peninsula's smaller resort towns remains below historical norms for September. The Costa Mar Reef Monitoring Network recorded visitor arrivals of 2,840 divers in the first two weeks of the month—a figure that sits roughly fifteen percent below the same period in 2024, according to data released by the Marine Ministry yesterday.

The softness reflects a pattern that has persisted since the container-shipping tensions of the past eighteen months. Even as federal inquiries into the 2024 grounding have moved into their second phase, the psychological weight of reef-impact concerns has kept some international tourists away. Local dive cooperatives have quietly adjusted their daily quota ceilings downward, a conservative measure that protects coral but also reduces income during what should be a peak season.

"We're not seeing the panic we saw last year," said Captain Elena Voss, who runs the Bahía Profunda cooperative from a dock south of Puerto Azul. "But people ask more questions now. They want to know about shipping lanes, about monitoring. That's a conversation we didn't have before." The cooperative has capped daily dives at twelve—down from sixteen in 2022—and maintains a waiting list for certification courses that runs three months long.