7,094 islands to go!

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We have just finished visiting our 13th and final island in the Philippines. There are a total of 7,107 islands, so we have just 7,094 left to visit on another trip! Wow, I thought we had covered quite a lot in our 5 or so weeks here, but we certainly have a lot left for next time!...

Since I last published a blog, we have been to three different places, all famous for diving. Consequently, we have done lots of diving recently, and let's just say I had some new and scary experiences underwater!

The first was at Moalboal resort on Cebu. We signed up for a dive at the most famous site in the area with a local dive centre. As is typical with local dive shops, they are great at finding things to see underwater, but don't exactly tell you what to expect as they give a very brief or non-existent pre-dive briefing. This shop was no exception. We jumped into the water from the boat and started descending down a wall, following a client who was leading instead of the dive master! Suddenly, at a depth of about 35 metres (we had never been this deep before!), I felt as if I were sinking and couldn't stop. As the water visibility was not the best that day, it felt as it I were being sucked down into murky abyss - eeek!

I put some air in my BCD (inflatable jacket) to counteract it, but it didn't seem to work - my BCD had failed and there was nothing to do apart from fin upwards! Panicked and finning hard, I reached Scott who was above me and grasped his arm while I caught my breath, and we both floated upwards, Scott hitting his head on the cave wall! It was only at that point that I realized that my BCD hadn't in fact failed and that I just hadn't put enough air into it as it was super-compressed - oops! Later, when we were discussing it, someone said that I might have been "narked", meaning a little out of it due to nitrogen narcosis, a feeling of being drunk from being too deep. Maybe that's why I assumed that my BCD has failed instead of realizing the truth that we were stuck in a down-current. Scary! I'll be avoiding deep dives in the future.

Not particularly impressed with the diving in Moalboal (local divemasters admit that everything is gone after having been fished out) we cut our planned three days short to just one day and headed up to the island of Malapascua. This quickly became our favourite island in the Philippines along with Pandan. In fact, it will hit our list of top ten islands in the world! It has a nice beach, decently priced accommodation and restaurants, and a wonderful floating bar, perfect for a sunset San Miguel.

Despite the ominous sight on dynamite fishing on the boat ride over, we did some fantastic dives. The most memorable was at a site called "Monad Shoals", dubbed the "Thresher Shark Dive". When our alarm went off t 4:15am we started to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into. Kitting up in the dark, we arrived at the site just as the sun was rising and jumped in. Due to strong currents we descended on a line and that's where I had another scare - my tank came loose and was floating freely! I was blissfully unaware of this until the dive master saw it and clipped it back in place! This dive is a strange dive in that you simply descend to a depth of 25m and then sit on a ledge and wait. We were lucky as we didn't have to wait long. Within minutes, our first thresher shark appeared out of the murk, instantly recognizable by the long tail. We sat there motionless apart from our bubbles, watching as it glided by silently before disappearing into the murk. That's all some groups saw, but we got really lucky as it came by again, then we saw two at a time. In our 40 minute dive, at least 30 minutes of it was spent being circled by a thresher shark! When we surfaced, we were elated. It is quite rare to see threshers we are told, as they tend to stay deep. The ones at Malapascua just come up to get cleaned at the cleaning station by small fish. Otherwise, they wouldn't be there.

Later that afternoon we dived on the exact same area. The afternoon is the time for the manta rays to be cleaned. It was the same deal; descend to 25 metres and wait. This time we were not so lucky as no mantas appeared - you win some, you lose some I guess. That night (I told you we went dive crazy!) we did a sunset dive. Again, having no pre-briefing we didn't really know what to expect. We jumped in and descended to just 5m and followed the dive master to a rock and waited...and waited...and waited. It seemed there was absoltely nothing to see, and we were really confused. After 35 minutes of absolutely nothing, we were getting very frustrated and kind of angry at the dive master for doing precisely nothing in terms of guiding. Then, it finally made sense. Two tiny but exquisitely colorful mandarin fish appeared before the bored group of divers surrounding their rock and began mating to a background of camera flashes! They were very cool-looking fish, I will admit, but I wasn't sure they were worth waiting 35 minutes for!

We continued our dive and it turned to night so we took out our torches. Everywhere we looked we saw tiny shrimps and many wierd and wonderful looking crabs, some almost unrecognizable as crabs due to all of the sponges they had attached to themselves! The cutest parts were a squid the size of a baked bean, and some seahorses - my favourites!

The next day we continued our diving frenzy with two dives at Gato Island. That's where I again had problems. The first dive was fantastic. Nothing went wrong, and we had a beautiful dive with amazingy colorful coral everywhere, reef sharks, a group of 50 cuttlefish, seahorses, 30 squids, and just about everything else I can think of. The next dive, however, was very scary. We started by descending to just 5m, which is where a 15m long cave starts. Just as we were about to enter it, I heard a loud rushing noise. At first I thought it might be the boat above us starting its engines, but then I thought again. Something didn't seem quite right. I poked Scott and motioned him to look at my tank, and then he motioned for me to go to the surface. When we met at the surface, he told me that he'd seen air streaming out of my tank all over the place. Obviously the o-ring seal had failed, again something that had never happened to me before. I was a little freaked out, but Luke (a dive master on holiday) assured me I was fine, and I swam to the boat to have a new tank fitted. Ready again, we all descended and entered the cave. We thought it would be a straight cave, with a view of the "blue" at all points. It turned out to be a zig-zag cave which was pitch black at times. I kept thinking that I was incredibly lucky that the o-ring hadn't failed about 20 secnds later in the dark cave, as then I really would have panicked! Scott and I went though the cave rediculously closely and were both glad to see the blue sea at the the end, with a big sea snake silhouetted in it! Despite the scary start, we had another fantastic dive with lots of colorful coral and more seahorses! Talking about it all later, we agreed that it has been all good experience for me. Even though I have over 60 dives under my belt now, I was still not exactly experienced as nothing had ever gone wrong. Now, with a few scary experiences (o-ring blow and down-current), I feel that I am a little more aware that things can actually go wrong, and hopefully I will be more prepared next time!?...

On our final dive on the island, there was a ripping current. After only 20 minutes of dive time, our guide motioned to go up for the safety stop. I wondered why we were aborting the dive so early and then I noticed that we were missing one person! Looking around frantically, he was no-where to be seen. When we got back to the boat, he was there waiting for us. He reported that he had been caught in a current, tried to swim back to us, and then was low on air so gave up and ascended on his own. I was glad to see him, but I was also glad that it wasn't me this time who had had a scary experience! We all met that night at the lovely Floating Bar for sunset beers. The toast: "To making it through our diving alive!"

Our final and 13th island was Apo Island. We chose not to dive on this island, not because I was scared, but because the reports we were hearing from other divers didn't inspire us. We had done a lot of snorkelling on the island and had already seen so much: beautiful coral, dozens of turtles, a handful of sea snakes, batfish, lionfish, a huge swirling school of jacks... We decided to save our pennies and just snorkel on this island. Besides, snorkelling is much better exercise than diving in my opinion, so you get the added bonus of being able to eat chocolate pancakes afterwards guilt-free!

We had planned an expensive stay on one of only two resorts on the island, but when we got there we discovered that there was a small village. A local lady called Mary had a few rooms for rent for a quarter the price of the resort, so we quickly took her up on the idea. It was quite simple, with only a bucket for showiring, but it did the job. The island was very quiet at night as electricity went out on the whole island at 9pm, meaning you had to be heading home to get ready for bed at 8:30pm if you wanted any light. We would be in bed by 8:50pm most nights, waiting under the mosquito net for the karaoke to stop and the lights to go out moments later (which also meant no fan so it was rediculously hot!) We soon got used to this early-to-bed and early-to-rise mentality, especially as it was hard to sleep in past about 5am due to the choras of roosters throughout the village shouting out "cock-a-doodle-doo" at the tops of their lungs!

It all worked out well until one night we returned home with just 5 minutes to get ready for bed before lights out a 9pm and disaster struck - a big spider was on the ceiling. Panicking that the lights would go out and it would be lost forever, Scott kept a watchful eye on it as I ran down for help. The dad of the Filipino family in the next room readily agreed to get it for us. As he tried to bat it off the ceiling, we shouted, "Kill it! Kill it!". He refused, saying it was not a harmful one, and instead simply threw it off the balcony. This sudden compassion for a spider surprised us in a country where new cockfighting arenas are built with the money collected from the "reef tax" which is supposed to go to preotecting the marine life. Still, it was out of our room and the lights hadn't gone out, and we were eternally grateful. I just hoped that it didn't know its way back home!

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Photos

Apo Island village
The narrow sandy streets that we'd walk down every day on our way to Mary's house.

Comments

[Stan]

Lives
Sharon You are not a cat, you DONT have nine lives! Be careful and make sure you come back safely. Love dad. xxx

[Michelle]

I knew there was a reason i dont like diving....all that stress of being underwater with little air. You are BRAVE, BRAVE. I personally couldnt do it - when i attempted it in Fiji i was ave. Glad that the o-ring didnt fail in the cave. Scary! Great floating bar - be great for a few nites out :) miss you x

[Andi and Paul]

Narked
Oh.my.god What are you guys doing diving to 35m without proper training - madness. When we did our advanced I had a similar experience - we went down to 30m and were asked to do a number of simple tasks to demonstrate how you could be effected by nitrogen narcosis. They asked us to write our name backwards and after thinking about it for ages I ended up writing a mirror image of mine. Whoops! It is a very weird sensation! Sounds like the diving is amazing! We're hoping to head to the maldives later this year to see if it lives up to it's fab reputation.

[Born to travel]

Narked reply
Hi Andi, We actually are trained as we did our advanced in Egypt, but they only take you to 30m which is dumb as the limit for recreational diving is 40m! I was fine at 30m, but maybe 40m is just too much for me...who knows. During my advanced course, I had to do a math problem on the surface and down below, and I actuially did it faster at 30m!!!