Little Corn Island
NICARAGUA
Shark Attack!
By AARON
Saturday, July 19, 2008
So upon leaving San Juan del Sur, we decided to head to the Corn Islands, which consists of Big Corn and Little Corn – both about 6 hours off the eastern coast of Nicaragua (by boat). Now there are 2 ways to get to these secluded island paradises:
- Take a plane from Managua to Bluefields (right on the Caribbean coast), and from Bluefields, hop a plane to Big Corn. From there, if you so desire, take a lancha for 40min to Little Corn Island. Cost for a round-trip ticket: $165US Total Time: 3 hours
- IF you time it perfect (buses, boats, and ferries must all come together on the correct days like a lunar eclipse…): Take a 9pm bus from Managua for 8 hours to Rama, where you arrive around 3am. Buy a ticket for the 1 1/2 hour boat ride down river from Rama to Bluefields that departs at 5:30am, purchase a ticket in Bluefields to catch the 9am boat from Bluefields to Big Corn (5 1/2 hour ride), then take the lancha at 5:30pm from Big Corn to Little Corn Island. Cost to get there: $35US Total time: 21 hours
Now everything we read in blogs prior to this journey all had the same advice: TAKE THE PLANE. But….. being the extreme cheapskates that we are, we opted for glorious option number 2 – as if we hadn’t learned anything from our San Miguel, El Salvador to Leon, Nicaragua debacle. Although we timed it to perfection, the 21 hour trip to Little Corn Island took its toll on us, and we arrived around 6:30pm on Wednesday night tired, hungry, and completely drenched from the lancha ride from Big Corn (really high waves that day). We decided on Little Corn due to our great time we had in Utila, Honduras, and we figured if the smaller of the 2 islands worked there, why not here as well? Little Corn didn’t disappoint.
Located on the east side of the island are 3 hostels that all offer private cabanas right on the beach: Carlito’s, Grace’s, and Elsa’s. Grace’s (also called Sweet Breeze), was our first choice because (you guessed it) it was the cheapest, offering a beach side cabana for only $15US per night. For the first 2 nights, we just relaxed, laid on the beach, and continually found ingenious ways to fend off the crabs and rats that would infiltrate our room at night in search of our food. They would prove successful the first night, but I soon thwarted their evil plans the following night by hanging our food bag from the ceiling.
Total score: Rats/Crabs-1, Aaron-1.
Known for its absolutely pristine beaches and great diving, the Corn Islands attract tourists and divers looking to relax, explore the abundant underwater wildlife and just get away from everything for a couple of days. Our third day there, Lyndi and I scoped out the dive shops on Little Corn, searching for the best deals on dives. This took a total time of less that an hour, considering there are only 2 dive shops on the island. After painstakingly researching both companies, and drilling the employees on things such as service, prices, and free cookies for signing up, we decided on Dolphin Dive. Dolphin Dive is the newer of the 2 companies, and from all the tourists and fellow travelers we had to wade through at the other dive shop, it’s definitely the less popular of the 2. This took nothing away from the experience, as our guides and dives were nothing short of spectacular, not to mention an average of only 3 people on each dive, compared to the 8 person average at Dive Little Corn (the other dive shop).
We started diving our next day, and on our first dive with Kevin, our divemaster, we were able to see 3 nurse sharks just laying around on the bottom of the reefs. This was great for Lyndi and I considering our 15 dives in Utila, although fun, yielded not one shark the whole time. For 3 days we did 2 dives per day, and for all six dives were never once disappointed as we saw nurse sharks, reef sharks, huge spotted eagle rays, giant porcupine fish (pufferfish), stingrays, moray eels, and much more aesthetically pleasing coral and underwater wildlife.
Little Corn Island has what I call “Little Island Syndrome”, where (I believe) due to its lack in size as an island, it surrounds itself with large underwater wildlife to compensate for this. Although this hasn’t been proven as fact, the theory is sound due to the fact that on every dive we saw huge nurse sharks, and some spotted eagle rays boasted a wing span of 6-7 feet.
On our last dive, we went to a site called “Caves”, because you swim through a bunch of caves (go figure), with “sunlights” in the ceilings of the coral, that allow light to penetrate into them. During this beautiful and exciting dive, we were in a group of 6, large for that day, and Lyndi and I decided to lag behind a bit and enjoy all the mysteries the cave had to offer. Rejoining the group, we saw them all huddled in a small semicircle at one large overhang in the caves, apparently looking at something. I signal to Lyndi if she knew what they were looking at, and she just shrugged her shoulders (the underwater signal for “hell if I know”), and so we both waited about 3m back, correctly poking our fingers in the sand, and “hovering” so as not to stir up the sand and silt on the ocean floor below, decreasing visibility. No one apparently taught this technique to our fellow divers, as they (excluding our dive master, Kevin) continued to ogle over this mysterious sea creature, while kicking up all sorts of silt around them. Looking around and not really paying attention, all of a sudden I catch this glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. I look over just in time to see an huge 8ft nurse shark burst through the silt that separated Lyndi and I from the fellow divers, and headed right toward Lyndi, missing her by about 3ft. It then headed right towards me, pausing for about 2 seconds before darting past me at a range so close we could have snuggled for a bit. Ohhhh, so that’s what everyone was looking at for so long…
*Side Note*- nurse sharks are about the most docile sharks out there, and while my insanely awesome writing skills may have given the impression that we were in grave danger, he was most likely just trying to get away from all the strange people bothering him. If anything, he was more scared of us than we were of him.
Once we got topside, that experience was the talk of the town (okay, just our boat) as Lyndi and I headed back to our cabana for the night, thoroughly satisfied of our diving experience at Dolphin Dive.
The rest of our time on Little Corn, including the gaps between dives, were spent doing what you do on a beautiful tropical island with no electricity: slept during the day, laid in hammocks, drank rum, and opened up coconuts using a technique I learned on “Survivorman” which surprisingly – to his credit – worked.
Lyndi and I had a blast on the island, and the only thing we would change about the experience was getting there, which we remedied on our last day, by purchasing 2 tickets from Big Corn to Managua on La Costena Airlines. Total trip time: 3 hours. Sweet.
I mentioned earlier that we stayed at Grace’s for only 2 nights. After those 2 nights, we went next door to Elsa’s which for only $5 more offered a cabana on stilts, greatly tipping the scale in my favor during my mini war campaign against the crabs and rats. This proved a succesful and strategic move on my part as we had no problems at all after moving locations.
Final score after 8 days in Little Corn: Rats/Crabs- 1, Aaron-7.
