Diving in Anilao

Trip Start Jun 22, 2008

169

219

Trip End Jul 04, 2013

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Where I stayed

Aquaventure Reef Club

Flag of Philippines Anilao, Batangas, Philippines
Sunday, June 13, 2010

June 12 is Independence Day in the Phillipines and a good time for a diving getaway to Anilao. It's been rainy in Manila due to the rainy season kicking in, but in Anilao our weather for diving was great although excessively hot and humid. We stayed at Aquaventure Reef Club for the first time in about a year. They are making some big improvements in the facility and the way things are managed. We were more pleased than before. The diving was great. We went out to Sombrero Island and a dive spot called Bahura that we hadn't tried before. We found a very large and docile turtle poking around for something to eat and posing for the camera one of our fellow divers brought along. He wasn't concerned with our presence at all and went about his business for a very long time before swimming away. This encounter was the complete opposite of the experience we had with a nasty Trigger fish that chased after us as the dive master kept it from taking a bite out of our legs. They are supposed to have a cone of territory surrounding their nest that you can swim out of to safety but this guy's cone seemed to go on forever

Turtle at Bahura

. Maybe he didn't read the rules. We know that sharks and baracudas are to be avoided but Trigger fish seem to be a bigger threat in this part of the world.

Our divemaster, Abet, knows where all the critters live on the reef and showed us a variety of them. This time we even saw the pygmy seahorses he showed us although they're still really hard to distinguish since they look exactly like the sea fans they live in. He told us that 2 are pregnant. They're so small, how in the world can he tell? Even with magnifiers in the mask its hard to tell they even exist. We'll take his word for it.

One of the big reasons to go to Aquaventure is the food. Compared to the other places we've been in Anilao they are the winners in that area (although they need to chill the beer better). We had an excellent Tilapia with ginger and chicken curry. But their dessert was nothing compared to the homemade brownies with caramel filling Joan brought. They were like chocolate heaven.

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