Borocay is the place where the beach hungry Koreans come to feed. The main touristic island of the philippines as our first destination… So why go there? Because of the wind! Borocay is also a world class kitesurf desitination. But beside that, pretty decent diving as well. Yapak is a deep wall dive, with sharks and other big plelagic fish, crocodile rock has nice corals and marine life. We actually saw a cuttlefish laying eggs. And for the first time in a year, I saw my nudibranch-friends again… We dove with fisheye divers. Very good shop.
Siquijor is the island of the witches, the voodoo and the ‘magic touch’. It is also a nice and calm island to dive from. 4 scorpionfish in 10 minutes. And nice and easy dives on deserted beaches… Only real fishes on the 1st of April!
Dauin is a world class muck dive site !!! South of Dumaguette, on Negros island, it’s a divers heaven! In two dives we saw leaffish, robust ghostpipe andcommon ghostpipefish, dwarf lionfish, many different nudibranches…
Apo Island is a small rocky island close to Dumaguette in Negros Oriental. It has been a marine sanctuary for almost 30 years now, and the results are there. Being one of the top 100 dive sites in the world, it has what it needs; more than 650 species and 400 kinds of coral. Especially the coral was very fascinating and in such good health!!! In the pictures; corals, large single cells, anemones, nudibranches, and more nudibranches!
Sumilon Island is a small island that once was university property until recently. Before that it used to be well managed by the research centre of Sumilon University, so there was no fishing in the area and it made the place a very healty place for fishes and corals. Now fishing is allowed there, but still a lot to see underwater.
Oslob is a little village at the south east tip of Cebu. It is here where the fishermen discovered a new business. Instead of hunting the whale sharks for their fins, to supply the monstrous chinese shark fins market, they started to feed them and make some bucks in tourism. The situation is very dubious. In one way, they protect their investment by not killing the animals, on the other hand, feeding the whale sharks is not done in a proper way. They keep the animals from migrating their normal way, bump against the animals mouths with their boats and it is starting to look like a big f***ing zoo with hundred of tourists all around the animals. More and more stories like this one came to our attention afterwards. –
link -Very dubious situation we discovered it to be, but not knowing what to expect before we went on, we where there as well, and anyways, and it is magical to see these big fish swimming around! Just hoping they will improve the conservation standards, like they did for example in Donsol, Philippines.
Moalboal. So, finally, we started our divemaster course. In Moalboal, this strange, small village on Cebu, where the half of the population consists of divers and the other half belonging to the sex industry and their clients… Strange atmosphere in the town, but after a while, we didn’t notice it anymore, and by the end of our stay, we where dancing with the local travestites in the disco. We met great people, went to a few fiesta’s, and of course, learned what we needed to become dive masters. We dived with Neptune diving, a Swedish-philippino dive shop, learned a lot from the instructors Thomas and Johan, local dive guides Jhonny and Raoul and our fellow dive master trainee Barry. It was a great time. To bad you can do your dive master course only once! In the 5 weeks I had a lot of opportunity to take pictures underwater.
