Diving with BIG animals in the most remote (and best) island on earth | Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Good morning freediving family, I'm in Cocos Keeling Islands and I don't want to make the call just yet but it may just be, it may just be the best place I've ever been to. It has awesome awesome surf, it has like world class diving and there is heaps of other things to do. Stand up paddle boarding, kite boarding, just any water sport you can imagine. Fishing as well, the fishing is obscene. So today we are going to head out to a little island nearby called Direction Island. We're staying on a place called West Island which is I suppose the main island of this little group of islands, you know, it's where the airport is. And here is the core of the operation, Jen. I don't think I've emphasised how truly remote this place is. The nearest island to it is 900 kilometres away, it's a tiny little atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Core of the operation, Jen. Hi. Now I may be exaggerating here but basically Jen came out here like 10-15 years ago when there was nothing on the island but three coconuts and she turned it into what it is today. Have a look what I made. That's right, Jen on her own, I may be exaggerating a little bit but it was something along those lines. While the others caught a ferry, me and Johnny took the small dinghy over so we could do a little bit of fishing on the way. Don't let it grab you, you're scared. Back away. So we are on Direction Island which is one of the islands in Cocos Keeling or Cocos Keeling Island as I keep getting told. So besides a few yachties that are on their way to Africa, we are the only ones here and it is an obscene paradise. And Johnny is over here filleting the fish that we just caught. Hello Johnny. Hello Adam. And that's lunch. Just dug a fish frame into the sand, we'll see how long it takes for a shark to come in and have a nibble. A little bit of sashimi, going to make some ceviche. Now we're making sashimi, no, now we're making ceviche. It is sashimi already. We're turning sashimi into ceviche. So the lemon juice cooks the fish, so we'll leave that here for, I don't know, half an hour, an hour and come back and they'll be cooked fish to nibble on. For a snorkel's time. At the southern end of the island there's a place called The Rip. There's a small gap between two islands where the current runs through it really fast and the coral there and the life is particularly stunning. There were little reef sharks everywhere, it was really really cool, it was a cool place to be. The fish life was really just abundant, you know, big fish and fish everywhere. In particular, I was blown away with the actual coral reef itself. It's the healthiest reef I've ever seen by such a huge margin. There's actually never been a large scale coral bleaching event in Cocos Keeling Islands. And this is us just having a little bit of fun, drifting with the current. Freediving is a lazy sport, don't work if you don't have to. I know I'm going to get asked this question, so I'm just going to say it. The way that I stay down on the bottom in such shallow water is by exhaling. Remember that fish frame we stuck into the sand, we ended up moving it to a new place and then while we were away the tide went down and we saw some sharks literally trying to come out of the water to eat the fish head that we stuck in the sand. I only filmed this with my phone so the quality is bad but it was crazy to see. We are spending the day checking out the diving in the area. The reason why I actually came to Cocos Islands was because we want to start running diving trips and holidays out here and so I've come out here to sort of suss out the area and see if it's worthwhile. So the things that we are looking for is basically, number one, an incredible paradise. Number two, we're after good, calm diving conditions for training and for people to train to dive deeper. We're after healthy, beautiful reef and fish life. And we are also after big mammals or big aquatic life to dive with. So let's go see if we can find it. So number one, we can just tick off the list because this place is just off Direction Island. There's a manta cleaning station so we went to go and swim with some mantas. We didn't actually know exactly where the cleaning station was so we looked around a little bit. We hopped in the water, swam around. We mostly found just little reef sharks cruising around. Then we spotted one. A beautiful, big manta just swimming really slow, going, I don't know, wherever it is that mantas go. We didn't try to swim with it. It didn't seem like it was keen to swim with us. We just let it swim by. Next we went around the northern side of Direction Island and we mostly just found sharks. Sharks everywhere. Sharks, sharks and more sharks. There were also a whole bunch of turtles swimming around. They were really beautiful. The turtles actually allow us to get really close and they weren't frightened by us. But it was mostly just sharks. Sharks and sometimes sharks and turtles. So we've been just sort of driving around and checking out different parts of the reef here and there's like everything. We ran into turtles and mantas and sharks and sharks and sharks and we ran into sharks as well. And it's been heaps of fun. The last spot we were going to today was Hawesborough Island which is the most northern island in the atoll. This is where I was most blown away by the reef itself. I'm not certain if the camera actually picked it up but there was so, so much fish life going around on these little low reefs. So it's safe to say that we have. What I was really hoping to find there though was a nice spot where we could do some deep training. The thing is that most of the interior of the atoll is quite shallow so we needed to find some deep water. But we knew that there were drop offs and shelves everywhere so we knew the deep water was going to be there. So it was just whether there was going to be strong currents there or whether it was going to be calm. And so when I got to the edge of the shelf we had absolutely calm, clear, cruisy, easy water. So we do have great training conditions. And then this happened. A pod of dolphins just swam up to me and started playing with me. It does seem like we have all of the boxes ticked. In the afternoon we decided to go stand up paddle board surfing. And I had one of the guys film me as I walked down to the beach. It's what all the cool YouTubers are doing these days. So I thought that stand up paddle board surfing would be easy. I mean I thought it would be like surfing with a boat but it is not, it is not easy at all. And I spent like two hours just falling over. Oh yeah, managed to stay on the board. After a while I started catching waves on my knees and then standing up just to make it easier. But after a few hours I managed to catch my first wave like a proper stand up paddle boarder. Oh yeah, there we go. And then I filmed some of the other guys with my drone while they basically showed off and made me look really, really bad. Such an awesome day. As if diving all day in incredible spots wasn't enough. G'day Tav. We decided to go stand up paddle boarding slash surfing slash falling over in the evening and it was heaps of fun. I tell you what, surely you think to yourself after like a whole day of diving and surfing and everything, the activities have to stop. But they don't. We're going to go and feed sharks tonight. He got ya. Whoa. I'm so blown away from exploring this place today. It seems like it literally has everything that you'd want in a diving location and just in general in a location. The thing is that there has never been any commercial fishing or anything like that at all out here. So everything is genuinely pristine. You know, there's just so much life on the reefs and the reefs themselves are so healthy. They haven't bleached or anything like that. And the sharks, man, there are sharks everywhere. It is, it is literally what the ocean worldwide should look like. That's what it is here. So is Cocos Keeling the best place on earth? Ah, yes it is. It is by far the best place, the most impressive and incredible place that I've ever been to and I cannot wait to keep exploring it for the next seven days. Thank you for watching Freediving Family. If you are new here, make sure you subscribe to the channel, especially if you want to improve your freediving. Feel free to check out these tutorials and some other adventures that I've been on.