Advancing
Trip Start
Apr 2009
1
41
Trip End
Ongoing
Malapascua, Visayas, Philippines
Thursday, December 10, 2009
So Malapascua is a tiny (well tiny as in 1km wide and 2km long) island a four hour trip from Cebu. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and we are melting! Luckily It's got crystal clear water, white sand beaches and some awesome dive sites to cool us down. Unfortunately there are a lack of snorkeling sites due to the amount of Dynamite fishing going on but hopefully this will end soon.
We decide to do our advanced Dive course here as we've been diving for 3 months now and its the sensible next step,meaning we can dive deeper and visit more sights and maybe even some shipwrecks! After speaking with Blue Water's Greg, "shrimps and crabs" ( a lovely guy and great instructor who talks about shrimps and crabs a lot), We chose to specialise in underwater photography, which we both found we love although its much harder than expected! The course took three days, mainly due to me being a wimp and freaking out on our deep dive (first ever). Just to clarify, I never wanted to do the shark dive in the first place! At least i made it to 27m before losing it so we technically passed the dive! Still, we took the rest of the day off for me to pull myself together again.
We went out on an all-day boat trip out to Calanggaman island which was our first experience with the underwater camera and two very good dives! We saw clams, bubble anemone, sea cucumbers, eel, trumpet and flute fish and our new favourite Nudi branches! We're getting much better at recognising all the different fish and came out with quite a few good pictures.
We also opted for the night dive specialty which is exactly what you would expect. As it's our first time we enter the water as the sun sets so it's not pitch black....yet. It's awesome to see all the nocturnal animals running around ,"shrimps and crabs' , and we had our first ever sea horse encounter! It was amazing, and we also came across some rare Mandarin fish, who rise spinning to the surface together whilst mating , and it looks like their dancing. A bit bizarre but very cool colours. Greg generously let us take the camera out again , which we loved although we saw a tiny blue nudi branch but couldn't get a good focus on it. Bummer.
The light disappeared very quickly and soon we were in pitch black, seeing only where we shone our torches (mainly in each others face). It was kind of creepy and very disorientating ascending at the end, but a really amazing diving experience. And crocodile free :p
Our longest dive reached an hour, a milestone for us as Dan practically eats his air! After practicing our navigation skills (swimming on certain compass bearing kind of like orienteering) we swam about at around 8 meters which is perfect depth for seeing all the bright colours of coral. We found an awesome new nudi Branch with wings, like an ultimate nudi branch. Plus some large spotted sweet-lips.
After completing our course we treat ourselves to a fun dive at Lapas Lapas and OH MY GOD! There were no big fish around but it was the most beautiful dive ever, with a huge soft coral garden that extended as far as we could see. There was so much marine life here and words can't even describe how stunning it was. Obviously, this is the dive where we didn't take the camera, which would have captured all the rainbow colours so beautifully. As well as the usual brightly coloured reef fish (which we are unfortunately becoming quite immune to now) we saw our first black frog fish, file fish and 'dancing' nudi branch. Wonderfull!
We had a night on the beers to celebrate our achievements and went to an 'all you can eat' buffet and filled up on meat and calamari....mmmm delicious!
Apart from diving we were so very lazy here. We had a few days of gorgeous weather so spent them sunbathing on the beach, venturing out for the odd snorkel if we felt like it. then eating pancakes and Pizza at Ging Ging's restaurant.
So,all in all, a very relaxing week!
