Philippines week 1 – underwater

It’s been a while since the last post. We’ve been largely incommunicado. We’ve been on a boat, or underwater.

We arrived at Cebu airport after a couple of hops to KL, then onto the Philippines. We taxi’d to our hotel (opting, after queuing for a white cab for 45 minutes, to pay the extra for a ‘yellow’ taxi… only to discover that ‘expensive’ meant an extra 30p). Checking out the following day after picking up a few essentials (sunscreen, additional t-shirts) at a local shopping centre, we were picked up by our dive boat crew for a week on board Infiniti, our Live-aboard dive boat.

Infiniti

Infititi is a proper dive boat. 19 cabins, purpose built, with dive deck, camera room, big mess/briefing room, sundecks, and even some very weak and sporadic Wi-fi! The Director of the boat is a Ukrainian chap called Nik, who is very polished at his job. Our dive master for the week is Lanch, a slight Philippine woman who is full of energy and enthusiasm. This is a comfortable boat. Our cabin is large, with desk, wardrobe, TV and fully-fitted en-suite bathroom. This is a step up from the Carbon Monoxide Death Ship of Indonesia.

Crew and Guests

We’re joined by 19 crew – one for each guest. 3 look after mechanics, tank filling, the engine, winches, boat maintenance, etc. 2 chefs and 2 waitresses, 4 dive masters, 4 boat crew, managing the zodiacs, and supporting the dives, 1 captain, 1 tour director, and 2 more doing something, busy, somewhere.

The guests are an eclectic mix from Italy, Australia, USA, Canada, UK, Korea, Taiwan, and other far flung places. A couple were pretty ascerbic and we kept our distance. Others were delightful and great company. While we ate together and had a few drinks, much of the time was spent diving, or preparing to dive, or sleeping, so this wasn’t a massively social affair. But a good bunch to spend a week with.

Day one

The weather wasn’t good for our first day. Our original plans were scuppered and the first dive was pulled. Nik directed the captain to another spot, but the dives weren’t particularly good. Small stuff, big walls, some nice corals but not replete with fish. The most interesting part was getting onto and off the tenders which were bouncing around on the big swells. We did a night dive, which was cool. The seas remained rough, so with us all geared up in black wetsuits and black dive gear, we made a good approximation of a team of SAS or Special Forces going on a mission. It certainly felt fairly intrepid – rough sees and wholly reliant on your one torch.

Day two

Today should have been a 5am start for a dive to see Thresher Sharks. I awoke at 04:30 to hear the boat attempting to anchor, but we were being tossed around in our cabin. The big boat was rolling around on waves and it wasn’t safe to attempt a dive. Instead, first dive was on a sheltered, but trashed reef, with the bad weather combining with bad visibility. All in all, a poor dive. Dive two wasn’t much better, but that afternoon, we moved to Gato Island, a rock stack in the middle of nowhere, with deep drop offs and big currents.

Our fourth dive of the day found us dropped from the zodiac near the cliff-edge, and rapidly descend, straight into a very strong current. We swam against it for about 10 minutes, twice Lanch threatened to abort the dive, but we persisted and found the mouth of an underwater cave. Torches on, we push against a slightly weaker current into the cave. I see a highly poisonous sea crate swim beneath me. This isn’t somewhere to hang around. The cave is actually a tunnel, burrowing 30 metres through the island with air pockets in places. We navigate our way through and emerge into a lovely coral garden in amongst rock stacks on the other side. This was more like it.

Day three – Thresher sharks

Today, we dived Monad Shoal. A world famous dive site, and the only known place where you can consistently find Thresher Sharks, as they swim by a cleaning station, where little wrasses come to purge them of bacteria and parasites, 30 metres down.

Lady Luck had not been on our side so far this trip, and her mood didn’t change today. Visibility was shocking; we barely had 3 metres. Currents were reasonably strong, but once we dropped down, we found a spot to settle on a sandy bottom and waited. We were watching both air (nitrox) and No Decompression times; both key to avoiding dying.

Suddenly, Lanch pointed as we glimpsed a dark shape of a shark’s tail as it disappeared into the gloom. Another 5 minutes later, and Lanch signalled us all to swim along the sheer drop-off to find another spot to watch. As we moved, a large Thresher shark emerged from the murk and glided by, its tail defining the iconic shape.

Given the depth, lack of light, the murk and the fleeting sighting, my footage of the shark is poor – even with post production it looks like a fake Nessy sighting.

We dived the same site again, but saw no sharks this time. Lanch left her Go-Pro on the sea floor to capture some footage of Garden Eels emerging. Despite us only being about 3m back from the camera, it captured a Thresher swimming by while we, oblivious, saw nothing:

Days four and five

Over the following two days we completed another 7 dives. Two dives on Panaon Island (Napantao Slope/Wall) stood out as world-class dive sites. Drift dives, we floated our way along huge walls of colourful fan corals, starting at 20m deep and gradually ascending in switchbacks in concert with the changing currents, onto a beautiful reef. This was as good as Sipidan in Borneo; a staggering amount of pristine coral and a vast number of fish. Shona spent much of the dive conducting an orchestra; her arms dancing to the beat of a thousand fish.

Funny though, we thought we were reasonably seasoned divers – having dived across 13 countries around the world and clocking up around 75 dives, but on this boat, we were complete amateurs. Most people had hundreds, several had thousands of dives under their belts. Many were DMs themselves. This was a dedicated bunch of experienced people. We learned a lot – but primarily, that we’ve got a lot to learn.