Off-season dive bookings rise, straining cooperative quotas

The first Saturday of August brought 214 divers to the moorings at Playa del Norte, a number the dive cooperative's logbook has not recorded in the high season, let alone the traditional off-season lull. The cooperative's manager, Elena Quirós, counted the boats at dawn and called the marine ministry's office in Puerto Azul before the coffee was done.

August is usually the quiet month on Costa Mar's reefs. The rainy season keeps the swell up and the casual tourist away, and cooperatives have long treated the month as a chance to rotate moorings and let the coral breathe. This year the pattern has inverted.

Quirós and her counterparts at three other cooperatives report bookings running nearly a third above the same period last year, with most of the demand coming from virtual citizens who have discovered the region through the federal tourism portal. The surge is welcome income, but it collides with the quota system the cooperatives themselves designed to keep diver pressure within the reef's capacity.

The cooperative federation has asked the Marine Ministry for an emergency variance to raise the August cap, and the ministry has promised an answer by Friday. The question is whether the quota exists to protect the reef from divers, or the divers from each other.