Certified Tracy Lavin and Lucy Cowan PADI o/w via Nomad Ocean Adventure, Musandam

My logged dives #1160-1163
September 28 and 29, 2012

Divers pictured: Graeme, Jonny, Vance, Tracy, Bobbi, Lucy, Faye

We spent another great weekend, Bobbi and I, in the company of good friends in our running group who came over to Musandam, Dibba to do some diving with us. There are changes afoot at the border. The border was wide open the first decade we lived in UAE. People just drove back and forth to and from either side of the wadi marking the boundary, and apart from the dip in the dirt road, you wouldn't know you had left one country and entered another. The impression that it was all UAE was maintained by the fact that you could drive through Oman from UAE Dibba to Ras Al Khaima. You passed an Oman border post on the way blocking the dirt track up the mountain that came down the other side on Kassab, but even the RAK hash house harriers held an event every year where teams would run from RAK to Oman Dibba and end with a party on the beach there.

They still do the Wadi Bih run each year, but now it runs from Oman Dibba to the top of the mountain and back down to end with, thankfully, a party on the beach, but it's not possible to pass the Oman checkpoint to continue into RAK. The Omanis still have no border control in Dibba but a few years back UAE put one at each of the two road borders and has been waving across people with valid UAE entry documents. This caused very little impedance, until now they have started requiring tour operators drawing clients from UAE to submit a copy of each customer's passport and UAE visa. This has caused no end of frantic emails and disruption to business folk on the Oman side, as we scan documents and they scramble to comply with the new regulations. According to the newspapers they have even closed their inland border post, the one on the main road, leaving only the one on the corniche open, This was ostensibly so that they could better match permits with passports by funneling traffic through just the one border, and according to those same news reports, this has caused demonstrations to occur on the Oman side which blocked the border for a time so that no one could pass <http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/protest-prompts-butinah-border-rules-talks-between-oman-and-uae.

So it was that we anticipated some delay crossing into Oman via the only UAE border point that was open after work on Thursday night. However, when we arrived at the border checkpoint at around 9 pm there was no traffic apart from us, and they waved us across after the usual cursory glance at our passports and visas. My students Tracy and Lucy were following in a car driven by a driver borrowed from where one of them works, and they were concered because they'd made no provisions for the driver to cross the border, but they tuned up at the Nomad hostel in Oman at about 11, with the driver, who had made no prior arrangements to cross he border. Graham and Jonny however, with Faye in the car, were delayed when they crossed the next afternoon. They were made to sit 20 minutes in a waiting room before being allowed to pass. Go figgah, as we used to say in Hawaii.

Meanwhile Tracy and Lucy had arrived too late Thu night to get anything done on their PADI open water course apart from fill in the paperwork and take the quick review test. They even missed dinner, which was waiting for them under plastic in the oven. We went to bed about midnight and agreed to meet by the pool at 6 in the morning.

I had wanted to meet IN the pool at 6, but there was no one around to issue them equipment when they'd got there so late, nor was there anyone up at 6 am, through we discovered they'd left the equipment and tank fill rooms open for us, so we were at least in the pool after briefing and showing how the gear worked by around 7. But it's difficult to get through the first module in less than an hour, and PADI standards are to exit, de-kit, and re-kit for a second session, which we didn't start until after 8. We finished it comfortably by 9 but Nomad's new system is to get the boats to sea by 9:30 a.m., and whereas that is welcome if you're hoping to get back to port by 4 and back to Abu Dhabi by 8, if you're trying to teach a course starting on Friday morning, it makes it hard to get the required 3 modules in before the second dive of the first day.

Lisa was in charge of our boat and she chose sites that would provide my students an easy first dive at Ras Morovi, with a second dive at Lima headland, where we could do the third confined water module during the surface interval in order for the students to qualify for doing the second dive of the day as part of their PADI course. We had a nice ride out and chugged into the familiar shallow bay at Ras Morovi where I've started many a PADI o/w dive course, and were descending under the waves by 11:30.

It's a nice dive. There's a pretty reef with hard and soft corals and plenty of fish. From time to time we've seen sting rays and eagle rays here, barracudas out in the channel, and at times of the year playful squid spawning. Today the ladies began their dive careers a little tentatively, as students often do, nursing ear problems, having trouble coming to depth, but controlling buoyancy well. I finally got Tracy to come down to a cave and see a ledge full of crayfish, their feelers spread wide almost two meters apart. Right outside that ledge Bobbi found a crayfish carapace discarded by some predator, possibly human. As we passed around the corner you can hardly detect unless you have a compass, and glided over the cabbage coral there, Lucy pulled my fin because I was passing by a turtle I hadn't noticed. We followed him as he swam casually away and then rounded the coral to the north coming in over sand and boulders that aren't all that interesting unless you see turtles there, as we sometimes do, or enjoy the clownfish in the anemones, as we saw on this dive. But I know that just ahead lies a coral garden decorated with blue soft corals, and with a ledge and a cave that have been productive in our experience for interesting ray encounters. No rays today, but continuing on there are coral coves that ride above the sand at depth. We were staying at around 10 meters, and I led us up to 5 where we did our safety stop from 50 to 53 minutes in our dive. With students, Bobbi and I are pretty good about adhering to dive times.

Back aboard we crossed the wide bay to Ras Lima on the other side. Most of the divers tucked into lunch but Tracy and Lucy and I took small tanks over the side to try and get through module 3. We had some problems. My 5 mm wetsuit required me to go deeper than 1 or 2 meters in order to compress it so I could stay down comfortably, and the ladies were having ear problems preventing quick descent to 4 meters. There was a little surge in the shallows where we ended up, but we managed to get through it before we exhausted the patience of the divers back on the boat, and made it back aboard for the 2^nd dive on Ras Lima.

We were the last in the water since we had to change our tanks, and the ladies were becoming a little waterlogged. But we eventually made it beneath the waves where we were a little disappointed by the poorest vis of the weekend. We started down gradually along the coral, enjoying the fish, especially the big sweet lipped puffer fish. Eventually we found a sand patch suitable for the dive #2 skill set. Happily neither Tracy nor Lucy had any problem with mask clearing or any of the tasks they were asked to do in the water, except maybe hovering, which I recall was a challenge even for the instructor candidates at my IDC in 1993. Once we were at depth our dives went well. This one was kept to 10-12 meters again, moving up to 5 meters at 47 minutes and surfacing at 50 after a safety stop. Toward the end of that dive I found a turtle in a cave looking like it was thinking to bed down for the night, but we disturbed it and it meandered off, possibly mildly annoyed with us. There were plenty of covered ledges in the area, and we were the last divers it would see that day, so I'm sure it survived the night.

We had stopped our dive a little short of the point but one diver who went there reported better vis and devil rays and eagle rays off the point. I do like the point myself, the water seems to go riot with bigger fish as you near it, though the bottom gets deep there. But we were happy to have got through the day with 3 pool modules and two dives completed, and now we were heading home to do the last two pool modules for the course, which we completed just before dinner at 9. We were so tired, me in particular now that my work requires me to drive to Al Ain every day. I was falling asleep at the dinner table, so Bobbi and I excused ourselves and we went back to our room. So glad we didn't need to get up for any pool modules next morning. We were exhausted from a long work-week and a longer first day of the weekend, 6 to 9, 15 hours (of pleasure, it's a great privilege to be in a position to teach diving as a professional hobby.) We slept soundly, me from the time my head touched the pillow, till after 8 next morning. I guess we needed it.

Rested for the following day I had only to plan a program that would get us through our last two dives of the course and include all the so called flexible skills as well. Because of recurrent ear issues I decided to plan the controlled emergency swimming ascent as the last item of business for the first dive (dive #3 in the course) and do all the other flexible skills during the surface interval. That would leave the u/w compass heading, which we'd leave for the last dive.

It was a calm day's boating and currents on Lima Rock were pretty benign, so we pulled in there for a first dive on the south side. Vis was not bad on the rock. I had a slate with me and I wrote a note on it for the ladies to keep an eye out for the little blue cleaner wrasse that the batfish so love when they park themselves at the cleaning stations and let themselves be administered to. The schools of batfish, and the seedy side, those somewhat obvious but tolerated cleaning brothels where the big batfish like to hang out, are one of the attractions of Lima rock. So are the huge honeycomb moray eels, though we didn't see any today, but we saw another turtle, and at one point, once the ladies had cleared their ears and we had got almost to 18 meters, we came into a huge school of barracudas, hundreds of them. We swam through them and enjoyed them until they managed to distance themselves from us, and we headed back to the rock and ascended slowly until we found a place where, 45 min into the dive, I thought we might tie off my smb, or submersible marker buoy, or what we more commonly call a sausage. By tying it off on a rock and fixing it to its tie, I was able to partially inflate it before releasing the reel without having it drag me up in the process. This allowed me to jam a lot of air in it before I released it which made the line quite taught. Of course this wouldn't work if you were planning to move with it attached to yourself, but it was a well deployed line if I say so myself. The ladies were able to CESA up it to end their dive on a high note.

For the second day in a row we missed our lunch break to work on our dive course. It's a little hectic to do it in just two days, but we managed. We got all the surface work done and then dropped in near the headland end of Lima Rock North side, near the submerged tunnel that goes clear through the rock at that end. As usual we worked our way slowly downwards as ears permitted but not far into the dive we encountered a current sweeping us eastward. At one point it was even a down current so I was constantly checking how the clearing was coming and struggling a bit myself to keep us together and at a comfortable depth. Our ladies did very well in such adverse conditions. Eventually we were able to work down to the sand where the currents are lighter. We also had some coves to sneak into for relief from the current. Here I decided to have their ladyships do their compass work, which they pulled off quite well given that 12-15 fin kicks north took them far whereas turning and trying to do the same thing back took them almost nowhere. But their direction was true so we completed the compass heading on target and regained our point. After that, we played in some swim-throughs, and Tracy and I both got some sea urchins in our knees, something which concerned Tracy a lot more than it did me. By now the current seemed to have shifted and we rode it comfortably back the way we had come. As I was taking us up to our safety stop we hit the point where the current was again blocking us so I eased us into a ledge with neutral current and again 47 to 50 min of our dive we spent in safety stop. We'd got down to about 16 meters on this one, nice dive, certified two new divers, very happy day.

Will the following entities please stop spamming my blog

Whereas I have been experimenting with Google Ads on my blog, just to see what would happen (nothing much has :-( but I don't care :-)) this blog is essentially non-commercial.  I therefore would respectfully request that the following providers of services in the UAE please desist making vacuous comments on my blog (such as those shown below).

Comments are welcome if they contribute to the conversation around diving in the UAE or anywhere, but the incessant comments generated no-telling-how show no understanding of what is in my posts apart from the fact that they are targeting a blog whose content is often about sea sports in Musandam.

If you would like to comment with any kind of substance regarding the content of the posts, welcome, but the comments of which the following are but a small sampling are becoming annoying, and I've been moderating them as spam (but they keep coming, so Google/Blogger needs to improve its spam filter).

The above were published apparently, but I removed them as spam using the tool shown.  Interesting there has been no spam as yet on THIS particular post :-). I added some appropriate tags to see if I could attract some ... 

Meanwhile, my Google ad earnings have been hardly stellar. I'll leave it on a while longer and maybe switch it off :-)

As a footnote here: I have renewed my request that the spammers please desist from spamming my blog here: http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2013/05/adsense-and-nonsense-not-dive-log-entry.html

Amazingly, they have left spam comments at almost every post apart from this one, suggesting that they ARE reading the blog.  In that case, thanks :-)

I take that back, checking below I see that they did get one post through in Dec 2012.  Ok, the brute force attack does let some get through, and now you see what I mean.

Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventure: Fun diving with Bobbi and Nicki

Logged dives #1158-1159

Bobbi and I hadn’t dived the entire month of August.  I was away on holiday the whole month in Georgia and Armenia <http://georgiarmenia2012.pbworks.com/>, hiking for exercise, no diving, and Bobbi was there with me for two weeks of that. I returned home a week ago but we spent my first weekend home resting and reuniting.  Then I had my first week of classes which is always stressful, and after 5 days of that, we decided to get some sleep Thursday after work and not drive over to Dibba to dive on Friday so as to take it easy that morning and not have to drive across the UAE until late afternoon.  For comic relief, we took Nicki with us and we arrived at Nomad Ocean Adventure in Oman Dibba right about dinner time.  It was perfect to arrive there after a relaxing day, fall into eating good grub and enjoying old friends and dive buddies, and eventually fall into bed and sleep comfortably all night, and not have to get up next morning until 8.

One of our acquaintances there was Khaled Al Sultani, a serious sea-life photographer younger than Dusty but larger than Glenn, and even more talented with a camera, whom we’d met on a recent trip to the Damaniyites. Here’s a link to his videos from that day <http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2011/09/bobbi-and-vance-fun-diving-at.html>.  On this day in Dibba, just one boat was going and we were all in the one, so we met again underwater where Khaled was photographing a pair of huge orange nudibranchs lying one atop the other under a panoply of purple processes.

We were at Octopus Rock. Current was right for it, just gentle to the north but not throwing us off the rock, vis was excellent, maybe 15-20 meters, and we’d descended in clouds of blue triggerfish. There were morays everywhere it seemed, large crayfish under ledges, caught in my torch beam, and then Khaled waved us over to see these phenomenal nudibranchs which he illuminated in his video lamps.

We rounded the rock in the blue coral patches and found some barracuda hulking in the far valley, lots of them. We found a ledge heading north-south, perhaps the wall Theo had told us about, and followed it south away from where we’d seen the barracuda, with every intent to retrace our fin kicks and recover the rock where we started. There were lovely things to see there and back, little blue crayfish with white feelers jutting out the rocks, morays, lion fish, Nicki found a black nudibranch but couldn’t find it to show it to me.  But she found a remarkable slipper lobster <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipper_lobster>.  She also found a small scorpion fish in the sand just before we met divers coming the other way presumably from Octopus Rock.

But we weren’t at Octopus Rock.  We were at the submerged rock just north west of it.  It’s a complicated site.  I guess the north south wall we had found might lead us back to Octopus rock at its southern end, but that had not been obvious from there, it just seemed to fall away to depth.  But we rounded the little rock we’d arrived at instead and in fact it’s a great place to do a safety stop, about 5 meters deep, and swirling with jacks and smaller schools of fish weaving in and out of one another in shades of silver.

Back aboard our boat we broke out lunch, good fare on Nomad boats, sandwich wraps of mystery substance, but tasty rice or pasta, fruits, soft drinks.  After eating and changing tanks, we headed south along the coast past Ras Morovi  to Lulu Island.

At Lulu Island we kitted up and descended on our usual dive where we drop on the west of the island, then round it to the north, and proceed underwater on an easterly heading to reach the other islands just further that way, finning at 16 meters along the bottom.  As we started heading east Nicki managed to rile some aggressive clown fish in the anemones on the way over.  We arrived finally in the usual spot amidships on the far island north and we headed clockwise around the island.  As we were turning the north corner we came on a black marble cowtail ray nudged up against a rock, trying to pretend we couldn’t see him but getting agitated over the fact we wouldn’t go away.  Eventually we left him alone and completed our circle of the island to come into the gap between that one and the next further south.  There in the sand beyond we saw a ray flying past, possibly the same one we had seen earlier.  We tried to chase it but he was just too far away and faster than we were.  So we continued south along the wall, finding morays and lion fish, until toward the end of that island again we came on yet another cowtail ray nestled into the wall like the first one, and rippling his skirts in the same way.  This could have been three ray sightings, or two, or the same ray encountered three times on one dive. Whatever, he was interesting to observe at close quarters with his nose pointed up against a rock wall, and no means of escape short of panic.  We were careful to give him space so as not to trigger that.

We were in a bay of islands which we followed south and then predictably west, heading for the seaward side of the island where we’d put in on the landward side. Visibility wasn’t as good as on the first dive, lots of particles in the water, though still good visibility.  We were looking for turtles reputed to be here, and we were gliding over coral patches sloping down into sand that looked inviting to turtles and divers as well.  But eventually this petered out into sand sloping deeper to the north (funny, we were diving with a 4^th guy named Peter J), and I thought if we headed west over that we’d arrive back at our island.  We were at about 17 meters, it was deeper to the north, so I tried to angle slightly to the south.  Ahead of us was a dark spot that seemed it could be land, but turned out to be mirage, just receding dark water.  We went over this until my air was approaching 50 bar, 45 minutes into the dive.  The only good thing was we had a 4^th ray encounter, another cow tail, but not the same one, this one was bigger and took off in a cloud of bottom silt.

            

The group seemed content with this, but I was concerned and decided to surface and see where we were.  When I did so I discovered the current must have nudged us north because we were past the island we were shooting for and almost to the wall of the mainland. So I went down and led the rest of the way west over the sand to where the coral resumed with beautiful fish and we were able to conduct our safety stops with something to see.  

Because we were in a place we weren’t supposed to be I got out my SMB, or submersible marker buoy, otherwise known as a sausage.  They are tricky to deploy.  First timers are liable to get dragged up with them as they fill with air if they’re not quick enough to release the trigger letting the reel spool out the line as the sausage shoots upward. I got mine up fine and Nicki decided to deploy hers because there’s this thing among divers to see whose sausage is bigger and can be deployed fastest.  Mine was first, but Nicki wanted me to mention that hers was new. She had also come across a reel in the sand and plopped it in her BCD pocket.  These things can cost $70-$100 so it’s great if you find one.  

When we surfaced, again at 57 minutes, Peter told us we had missed seeing a trio of seahorses that Nicki was showing him, about the time I’d decided to surface to see where we were.  I thought "darn!" at the time, but we’ve seen lots of seahorses lately.  But when we were talking to Nicki about it in the car on the way home she said she didn’t see any seahorses.  Turned out they were pipefish, sort of a straight line version of a seahorse with a seahorse head and beak.  Nicki hadn’t mentioned them earlier because every time she was going to, Bobbi had said again how happy she was with her new mask which she bought in Texas after having problems with ill-fitting masks earlier in the summer in Philippines and Perhentien in Malaysia.  Her mask had developed a leak in the skirt just as we were leaving on that trip and the one she took with her hurt her nose with its plastic.  She bought a new one in Malapascua but that one was just as bad.  So when she was in Texas she bought one from a company that accommodated special faces.  Anyway that’s about all she talked about on the way home, and she wanted me to mention  it in my blog.

Fun diving on Al Marsa liveaboard to Musandam

My logged dives #1152-1157

You don't get on a liveaboard to Musandam for superior diving. You do it to get away, to totally relax, to be pampered in a cycle of dive, eat, sleep, repeat.

I put my deposit down and let myself flow into the break from real life back on dry land.  On Thursday I lingered at work till about 2:30 and then hit the road, direction Dubai, moving slowly over to Dibba driving alone 3 hours in my car. I got torch batteries on the way, gas at the pump in Oman, took my time, and arrived at the Dibba Oman port well before dusk, in time to check out the large sharks hauled up on the boat landing slab at the impromptu fish market. One was a guitar shark. I was one of the first on board, others trickled in from 6:00 to as late as 7:30, and when all were present, we were invited for dinner on the top deck in the harbor. It's not practical to eat al fresco on a moving boat, so the first meal is served in the harbor.  This being the case, there was no need for anyone to get there before 8 pm.

I was along because one of my ex-students, Greg Golden, had assembled a group of his buddies for one more stage in a “summer of diving” while their spouses were away for the summer. I'd had to miss their trip to Kassab because Bobbi and I were in Malapascua, but two weeks before they'd been in the Daminiyites. I was finally able to hook up for this big splurge liveaboard trip, much more affordable while my spouse was away in Houston, though I miss Bobbi as a dive buddy. The cabins on the liveaboard are cramped but fine for a couple, and with Bobbi, all our dives last an hour. On this trip I was buddied with the dive guide, and he was obligated to end his dives at 50 bar or 50 minutes, whichever comes first.

Itinerary for the trip - Thanks to Simon Lange for use of the photo

We motored up to White Rock overnight where aboard the brown dhow I got a lie in till almost 7 a.m and awoke to a brilliantly clear morning moored in a fjord surrounded by stark mountains rising from the blue sea.

Thanks to Simon Lange for contributing the photo

 The dhow stayed where it was and we got in a speedboat and went to the seaward side of a ras called Kaisah. I don't think I'd ever dived that side before, but the current was ripping. We all got buffeted along until we'd hit an underwater cove and the backwash created a back-current that we had to struggle into till we reached the other side and hitched a ride on the rip current again. The current gave us good vis, but there wasn't much to see, nothing unusual at any rate, until we got out to the point. Just before the point we hit another back current and this was the end of the dive for Greg and his buddy, another Greg (Perry). Both were low on air from the hard finning into the back currents, and I myself was at 75 just 35 minutes into the dive, but pulling myself along on the rocks, so when Greg and Greg went up, Brian joined me, and we rounded the point. Here we saw a barracuda, and sheltering in the relative slack around the point, a turtle. It was a nice start to a 4-dive day.

Who trained this guy? Thanks to Greg Perry for this photo of Greg Golden, as he explained "demonstrating the risks of improper SMB deployment as part of my "Don't do this" series of advanced scuba instruction.  While it looks very realistic, I was totally in control of the sitch."

Breakfast was waiting on the sun deck, and when we'd had that we still had an hour and a half to kill so I went and laid down in my cabin and completed my lie-in with a morning nap. Then at 11 we all piled back in the boat for a second dive on the inside of Ras Kaisah.

This was the same place we'd overnighted last time Bobbi and I had come out with this company, only on that trip the dive leader had taken us inside Ras Kaisah on the first dive and then on the headland opposite for the second, and I recall that all aboard were a little disappointed in the choice of dive sites, especially once we'd seen that White Rock lay just off the mouth of the khor. But White Rock has variable currents. Whereas many people who shell out for this kind of trip are committed and experienced divers, there are also divers with limited skills, so dive sites are selected conservatively. Ironically you could get a speed boat from Sultan Qaboos Harbor to advertise a trip specifically to White Rock, if you wanted to dive it, but it doesn't seem to be on the Al Marsa agenda. They've been in the area a while, I'm sure they have reasons for avoiding it.

Brian explained that current would come from the north and strike the headland and diverge in such a way that current would be going out to sea from a particular spot and running inland on the other side of that spot. If the current had slackened we could dive to the left toward the point where we'd seen the turtle and had good visibility, but he seemed concerned when we reached the spot that the current was too strong, so he had us head inland with the reef on our left. This took us into poorer vis away from the point, and though it was a comfortable, pleasant dive, we didn't see much apart from lots of fishes, though Tom Longo, another instructor along with us, saw turtles in his buddy pair (with my cabin-mate Guy).

Red lion fish, photo by Simon Lange

So now it was time for lunch, and after that I lay down on the cushions on the aft deck for an afternoon nap, really shaking off stresses from a week at work where we were short of teachers and creaking at the seams to keep that ship afloat. Sleep was facilitated because the dhow was under way and the ships engine and the slop of the sea on the hull lulled me. When it came to anchorage in Khor Habilain, and the engine stopped, I awoke to the sound of Led Zepplin from someone's iPod playing from the top deck above.

Three p.m was time for our third dive, this one on the inside of Ras Dilla at a site Al Marsa have named Muqtah (no telling why). Brian again outlined a conservative profile. We would go in the speedboat a little ways out the headland and then work our way back towards the dhow. By not heading seaward out the point, we would avoid any threat of current (and the interesting animals that like current that one might encounter at the ras, or point, itself). As some people say, “it's all good”, and Brian is a good dive leader. We were settling into each other's dving styles, and the Lebanese named Roland whom Brian was shepherding was proving to be good on air consumption. So I didn't mind joining him again. Apart from Roland, I was the odd diver out. Everyone else was paired. Rather than assign me to Roland, Brian had had Roland buddy with him, leaving me to be a free agent, to attach myself to whomever I pleased. The last two dives I had ended up with Brian. This third dive I started out with him and Roland.

The direction we were heading had hazy visibility, but to compensate if Brian was looking in the coral walls I would look out in the sand, and if Brian moved to the sand I would keep an eye on the corals. The corals were teeming with fishes but the interesting stuff was out in the sand. At one point I saw a big fish there, the only time I had tapped my tank up until then. It was a yellow finned barracuda. On Brian's watch he tapped to show us a sting ray, a large marble one like the one I'd seen at Lima Rock two weeks before. He rippled fast along the sand but when we chased it, it wheeled toward the reef and the passed slowly before us, so I could clearly see its marbled dorsal side. It headed slowly toward a hole so we followed it there and shined out torches on it.

Scorpion fish, photo by Simon Lange

There was more in the sand. Brian showed us a scorpion fish I would likely have missed. He also noticed a small jaw fish and pointed it out just as it slipped deep into its hole, where I could barely see it in my torchlight. He also pointed out some tiny arch-backed harlequin shrimp in one of the soft corals. Brian is from Philippines so when he showed me that he took me back to Malapascua, where the dive guides were so good at finding the small stuff like harlequin shrimp time and time again.

When that dive was done we got back aboard the dhow and it headed south toward Lima headland where we would do a night dive and two dives the following day in the area where we normally visit on day trips from Dibba.

However, one great difference in liveaboard diving is that when we arrived at Ras Lima, it was dusk (signalled by a booming canon shot from the seafaring town of Lima at the start of Ramadhan), and we were about to do a night dive there. This turned out to be one of my best night dives ever. We had a large group and people stayed together and called each other over to their discoveries, which seemed to happen one after another. We saw lots of eels, including one peppercorn or geometric moray, hovering lion fish, and a couple of trumpet fish.

Peppercorn moray, photo by Simon Lange

There were lots of squids that were attracted to our lights. They would swim into them, right in our faces in other words, and then escaped in a cloud of ink when we touched them. There was a scorpion fish that was walking along the bottom on his lower set of fins, and a baby one just a centimeter long, very hard to see. I found a small crab in a rock and nearby a cuttlefish that became agitated when lit up. There were large pufferfish resting on the bottom that just ignored our lights. There was a rope running down to depth encrusted in marine life and at 18 meters deep we found a seahorse on it.

Seahorse at night; photo by Greg Perry

At one point a marble ray without a tail appeared and rippled through the divers lucky enough to see him. I was the last in the group so I saw him plop down in the sand away from the lights, raising a cloud around him as he did so. This dive lasted just 40 minutes, by order of our dive leader. At the end I wondered why my buddies, usually so meticulous about time, hadn't gone up yet, and then I discerned from their unfamiliar gear that they were divers from another dhow mooring in the same cove that night.

Fluids tasted so much better after a night dive, and I'm not sure how long after dinner I went to bed, but crew hands were stomping on the foredeck overhead of our bunks at 6 a.m so there was little chance of oversleeping the 7 a.m dive. This was planned for Octopus Rock, and during the briefing Brian mentioned that if there was current present at the dive site he would abort that site and take us to Ras Morovi. When we arrived at Octopus Rock there were two boats there already with divers preparing to enter the water, but Brian pointed at the obvious current and told the boat driver to take us over to Ras Morovi. I was disappointed on the way over but at least Brian's choice of Ras Morovi sites was the seawardmost face of Jilly Island, which I have dived only once before. I had been planning to join Brian and Roland on the Octopus Rock dive because the dive site is complicated and I've never led a dive there and knew where I was accurately. I was first kitted up at Ras Morovi before Roland had started to put on his tank, and Brian was helping others enter the water. First in were Tom Longo and Guy, my cabin-mate, so since I was ready I decided on the spur of the moment to join them. I didn't have time even to ask. I just let Brian know what I was doing and descended with them, and after a while they understood we were a threesome.

We hit a sand bottom at 17-21 meters and went along in fine clear water, each of us using torches to see better. There wasn't much to see apart from beautiful blue soft corals, a moray or two, and lion fish in the crevices. But soon Tom started banging on his tank with his torch, pointing to a ray in the sand. As he started to ripple he stirred fine silt and it was even then hard to see what was causing the commotion, but I arrived overhead in time to see a large cow tail ray, minus his cowtail, heading away from us divers. He was too fast to follow for any distance.

We went the length of the island north to south and where we turned the corner we encountered strong head current. No one communicated not to go so we clawed our way forward. Tom signalled 100 bar at this point and it was hard breathing to get through to where we were heading north on the other side. Guy pulled even with me and we found ourselves surrounded by bat fish, some undergoing complete makeovers from the administrations of the tiny wrasse. We were just entering that slack space, me in the lead by now, when a ray shot past me over my left shoulder (reef on my right). I thought it was an eagle ray from its speed but it was more brown spotted and diamond shaped (I think), but I remember the tight body, long tail, and speed so fast there was no point in having a camera. The guys strung out behind me would have seen it for a few more seconds as it overtook me. Tom said he thought it was an eagle ray.

I doubt that because I saw two more eagle rays later in my dive, and the one that shot past me was not one of those. I was just passing through 100 bar at this point and my buddies were rising higher on the reef. Below me I saw a turtle. Vis was decent but not superb so animals were vanishing into the haze. I could see my buddies were ascending, I could see their fins near the surface. We were only 40 min into the dive and my air was holding. I was still at ten meters and I had an SMB and I signaled that I was deploying it and I think it must have been obvious that if they wanted me I'd be below the SMB. We'd been finning into a mild current, it seemed to be bringing out the animals, and I decided I'd just hang out literally at 12 meters, and let the current carry me the way we had come. I figured I might encounter other divers from our group coming up that way, and I could join them.

That's when I saw the eagle rays. This has happened to me on wrecks in Abu Dhabi when for some reason or another I've been left alone and had the opportunity to watch the rays come back to the wreck. They seem to avoid groups of divers but they don't notice one diver hovering until they're already on the scene and then in the case of eagle rays, they shoot off like a jump jet. The first eagle ray did that and I thought like wow, when moments later another happened along. Just like the first, he rippled toward me, noticed that I was not one of them, and departed in an impressive display of power and grace. Two eagle rays, rare and sublime.

I played no games with time or bar. I ascended with 50 bar and reached the surface with 53 min. on my computer. I had heard the boat gears grinding just minutes before but when I reached the surface I was alone with my SMB. I was just on the far side of a gap in the rocks, so I swam through the gap and saw the boat, as well as a turtle passing on the reef below. The boat happened to be downcurrent, so I was there in no time.

Back at breakfast on the sun deck you could feel the anticipation of the upcoming whale shark dive. Peter was wondering what dive he could do with his advanced student and we were talking about a whale shark specialty dive and how in case the WS didn't show up, we could drag an object through the water and students could practice not touching it and how to keep buoyancy while keeping up with it and keeping the correct distance from it, and photographing it without flash and so on. In his briefing Brian always tried to avoid mentioning the something big so as not to jinx the dive, and he explained how he liked to dive the south side but if there was any current he'd switch the the north.

We headed over to the rock in the speedboat and Brian checked the current north, east and south of the island, and found one midway along the south side. But it was pushing to the east, he figured we could drift with it, and he figured on the east point we could round the rock to end the dive on the north side, and that was our plan.

I was planning to dive with Brian but Tom and Guy were in the water first and shouted for me to join them, so I jumped and went with them. There was a major current, more than I would have tolerated if I'd had to make a decision based on my usual method of jumping in the water and seeing if there's current, and if there is mid rock, go to the other side. But it was turning into a nice dive. My buddies kind of deferred to me so I followed my whale shark strategy of keeping at about 12 meters, though the current was pitching us all about, and we were sometimes at 16 meters or more. Meanwhile the other divers had gone deeper, to 20 meters and were diving deep. Vis was very poor. I didn't think they'd be able to see a whaleshark overhead whereas at 12 meters you cover where the WS is most likely to be.

But the problem is when vis is bad you can't see far enough out into the water to see where the WS is likely to be. We saw lots of interesting things. There were shoals of barracuda passing and we finned back against the current and managed to join them. At times we found ourselves in the midst of playing trevally darting about. Always we were carried by the current, at times faster than at others, but always cognizant of the fact that the current might want to sweep us off the rock and make us miss our turn through the gap to the other side. So I was playing this dive 12 to 16 meters and close to the rock.

Other divers were playing it deeper and farther from the rock, due to the slope at that depth. Consequently we heard their tank banging but I thought maybe a divemaster was warning a student to get in out of the current. But no, that was their first whale shark sighting. They said it passed overhead. They were too deep at 20 meters, the WS was at 16 and moving against the current, and they couldn't chase it, so they didn't get a great look. But we were at 12 and couldn't see to 16 and that far out to sea.

Picture by Greg Perry (with thanks)

When I saw Brian at the corner he signalled me a definite WS sighting, so I knew then that we had missed it. Back on the boat he told me they'd seen a second small WS as they were doing their safety stop at the corner. Meanwhile guy and Tom and I were heading for the spot on the north side where I'd seen a WS two weeks earlier, but we had no luck on our outing this day.

Except for the missed whale shark, in aggregate it was a phenomenal dive weekend. When we came up and the boat came to pick us up, we saw a pod of a dozen dolphins breaking the surface just beyond the boat. I tried to swim over to them but they dived and moved further away, always out of sight. They and the barracudas and trevally on the Lima Rock dive made it a better than normal Lima Rock dive. I've seen my quota of whale sharks already the summer. I had a great weekend out, relaxing and highly charged in spurts, challenging diving, nice company, nice time.

Chasing dolphins, photo by Simon Lange (with thanks)

Fun diving and starting Daniel Sobrado's PADI rescue course

My logged dives number #1148-1151

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Very nice dives this weekend.  Friday July 6, Daniel taxi'd to my house and we drove over and picked up Nicki before 7 a.m.  In 3 hours we were at the Nomad hostel on the east coast, drinking nescafe (yuk!#) and waiting for Chris to organize us.  One boat had already left for the far north, but sea conditions were not good on this day.  In fact, the UAE authorities had confined boats to harbor, as we learned via mobile on the drive down when contacting Freestyle about our diving the following day. Oman authorities were not so restrictive, and we got under way and headed north through rough seas, but not as rough as I have before seen them, heading for the relief of Ras Lima (Headland).

Our first dive there was a nice one.  It was a leisurely refresher for my former student Daniel, shepherded through his open water and advanced, and now working ostensibly on his rescue course.  We put in way back near the town of Lima, so as to avoid currents closer to the peninsula.  As we were kitting up we noticed a fin breach the water and a whale-shark sized shadow lurking in the clear green.  We grabbed snorkel gear as fast we could (where is my other boot, it was JUST here .. where?) but no one got in fast enough to see the elusive creature, so we treated that as a cooling off interruption in the 40+ July temperatures and resumed kitting for our diving, easing into the water, heading west with the reef on our right.

It was a nice dive. I saw over a dozen crayfish.  We found lion fish, batfish, lots of blue triggers.  Toward the end of the dive, over an hour, Nicki found a sting ray under a rock.  While she was photographing it, I found a huge puffer the size of my thigh hiding in a rock ledge just above the stingray lair.  Poking into more rocks, still waiting on Nicki, I discovered a crayfish whose tentacles were spread to where I could just reach each end with the fingers of my outstretched arms, that big.  Lovely animals hiding in lairs on the headland that day.

Daniel couldn't get our attention so he brought the moray closer where we could see it too

We came up eventually and back on the boat were feasting on mystery meat sandwich wrap, pasta or rice salad, and Lulu pizza, followed by cupcakes and watermellon, when Chris asked where we wanted to go next. It seemed he though Ras Morovi would be nice but Nicki would have none of that.  I interjected that there DID appear to be whalesharks around, and maybe Lima Rock north side would be a better option.  Seas were rough but there was shelter there.

No one objected so we headed over to Lima where there were already dive boats around waiting out their surface intervals.  We kitted up and went in leisurely. I'd been cold my first dive so I changed my 3 mm wetsuit for a more comfortable one of 5 mm and used that on through to the next day.  Surface temperatures were a warm 30 C ++ but at depth we easily lost 5 degrees C.  On this dive, I dropped to the sand at 18 meters, and immediately found a sting ray under a rock ledge there.  The three of us gathered around it.  I was shining a flashlight on it, Nicki was photographing it as usual, and Daniel was just observing, when Theo suddenly appeared next to us and pointed up.  I thought for a moment that this might be a new diver recall procedure, but he was pointing with his index finger, not his thumb. I pointed to the ray we had found, thinking he might be interested in that, but he seemed adamant, so, ok, I looked up, and saw a whale shark passing overhead.


We were at 18 meters and the whaleshark was at 12, so we didn't head straight up, but we kept our eyes on our computers (ok, one eye on the computer, the other on the whale shark) and made a safe ascent while we kicked to overtake the whaleshark and the half dozen other divers who were riding shotgun.  To everyone's credit, no one touched it, and we were able to come right alongside it, so close that when it turned to the right I had to back off to avoid being whisked by its tail.

That's me (Vance) just behind the dorsal fin.

And this is Daniel enjoying the view (he's dropped the ray by now - Nicki is behind the camera and didn't get in the photos :-)

These things are always curious when a bunch of other large bubbly creatures enter the water, though they keep moving slowly but steadily when among divers or snorkelers.  So divers can keep up with them if they wish, or they can enjoy for a few minutes and conserve their air for other delights in diving.  Someone reported spending 18 minutes with this particular whaleshark, but we dropped out after about 5 and went on with our dive at depth.

Or dive had not ended.  We saw another ray later and later yet another marble ray, with ripple-span again as wide as my arms might stretch.  But the unusual thing about this ray is I saw it coming toward us gliding over the reef, right at me, and then underneath me.  And then it wheeled about and came back around us and again across my bow.  I don't remember how many passes but it was only mildly perturbed at our presence and made a great show of itself, gliding near, as I said in my Facebook message, rippling like a Spanish dancer. Beautiful creature.

July 7 - Two dives on Inchcape 2

It would have been nice to return next day to Musandam with Nomad but we had made our booking with Freestyle, thinking originally to make a quick trip out to the Inchcape 2 wreck and return by 11 or so and head home to Abu Dhabi.  But when we called to confirm that we learned that they were doing Inchcape 2 and then 1, two wrecks, the first in 30 meters and the second in about 26.  Fish life is slightly different on each so we said sure, we'd be back around 1:30, early departure for Abu Dhabi, why not.

It was a nice plan and we got to see Andrew Moore again, who had facebooked that he had a weight belt with my name on it, so I could pick it up there, which I did. However, when we completed our first dive on the "inch" we were told, change of plan, the UAE coast guard didn't actually want us out there, so there had been a decision (made before we set out obviously, but we were just then informed) that we wouldn't be able to proceed further south that day so our second dive would be on the same wreck, the Inchcape 2.

It's a nice wreck, nice day out, who can complain, and 'nuff said, but on a wreck at 30 meters, the first dive is 20 minutes, and the second dive, after an hour (and nine minute) surface interval, is 12.  Sami in his briefing  said ten minutes, but we had checked the tables, since diving twice to 30 meters with no change in levels is essentially table diving, and seen that the NDL if your SI is 1:30 is 14 minutes, and if you give it 2 hours, you can have 17.  So for those driving back to Abu Dhabi it was a question of 30 min. more sleep that night or 2 more minutes of dive time.  Anyway these calculations give you something to do while having lunch and waiting out your surface interval on a small rocking boat, many fighting queasiness.

The Inchcape is a pretty dive, clouds of snappers covering the wreck, parting when divers ease through. Sometimes there are honeycomb morays there, and seahorses.  There are often rays in the sand.  On this dive a huge flounder was seen, and some strange looking crocodile-like fish in the sand.  It's a cool dive.

Nicki and Vance hanging out at 30 meters. All photos in this post taken by Nicki Blower (or with her camera) with the exception of the Facebook screenshot shared by Julian Palmer

Diving off Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

Logged dives #1139-1146

Sister Marylin, son Dusty, Vance and Bobbi, auntie Clara, uncle Alouyshious, and Dusty's good friend Michelle, having shave ice in Kota Bharu

To make a long story short, Dusty and his Malaysian girlfriend Michelle were in Kuala Lumpur so Bobbi and I flew there from Cebu, spent the night at their place and met her parents, and flew out the next day to Kota Bharu. To go to the Perhentian Islands from Kota Bharu you need to get a taxi to the Koala Basut jetty, 78 ringit official airport cab rate, and from Koala Basut we were charged another 70 for two to go one-way in the water taxi to Perhentian. We arranged the water taxi through the Coral View office at Koala Basut but I think it was the public taxi. We had defaulted on the Coral View because Michelle and her family were flying out there and planning a stay at that resort, and our intent was to be with them.

Rooms at the Coral View cost about 200 ringit a night (for two, excellent rooms steps from the beach, but no meals) which is expensive I think. If you were doing this on your own and want to do it cheaper you should probably find an area in advance via Lonely Planet and then get the water taxi to there, then scout around and see what's available. I hear the place packs out in July. But when we arrived late June it seemed rooms were available but the water taxi needs to know where to drop you off. The last of the water taxis from Kota Bharu might be at around 5 or 6. It's an hour taxi ride there so you need to arrive in Kota Bharu at 3 at the latest if you want to make Perhentian that evening.

Since we were meeting up with Dusty and Michelle and Michelle's family next day we found a nice room at Coral View just 25 meters away from the dive shop. The Coral View observes Islamic prohibitions on alcohol. They should probably be a bit more up front with that on their web site, but you can walk 100 meters down the beach to the Reef and buy beer and rum in cans and bottles on a takeaway basis and do what you like with it. You can also jungle trek to the next beach over, about 15 min following a water pipe line, so there is little chance of getting lost though it's an up and downhill track, and have a couple more options for alcohol with your meal. You can water taxi back if you are willing to negotiate after 7:30 rates, or if you walk back (because it's only half an hour even though it's dark and unfamiliar, and you get fed up with negotiating all the surcharges), be sure you have a flashlight.

You don't need to jungle trek to see animals. You can see monkeys, birds, flying squirrels (very impressive when stretched out and on the fly), bats, and large monitor lizards around the rooms at the resorts, since the mountainous islands are still mostly jungle. I guess the animals come to the resorts for the food and the lizards are shy when spotted but otherwise appear to be the most brazen.

The morning after our arrival we started diving. The first site had no name because it was an exploratory dive, but it was to the north-west of Perhentian in the island group in the vicinity of Takong Laut (see the map on the Pro Divers World web site: http://www.prodiversworld.com/?option=divesites&lang=en). We were pleasantly surprised at how warm the water was. Visibility was decent, but it was not a heart stopping dive. We saw a small red scorpion fish and some warted sea slugs. Others saw a blue spotted ray and some turtles. It was a pleasant dive, comfortable, lasted an hour.

No sooner had we returned to the Pro Divers World dive center but we were off to the Sugar Wreck at noon. The wreck was in about 20 meters of water. You see pics and a video at the shop web site http://www.prodiversworld.com/?option=divesites&lang=en by pulling down the link in the list of dive sites, but there doesn't seem to be a direct link. I'm not enthused by wrecks per se but I like the sea life that lives on them. I found what looked like the catfish in the cave at Gato Island under the stern, but could have been a bamboo shark, as we found more of those nearer the bow, interesting quivering, gaping animals less than a meter long. We also found a scorpion fish on the hull resting on a living clam shell, really difficult to see, camouflaged exactly as the wreck.

The last dive of the day, since we didn't do any night dives, was at Shark Point. There was a group of open water students doing skills on the same boat with us. We were totally separate in our diving, so our dive with our dive guide Marion could be as long as we wanted, and lasted 85 minutes for us. It started with descent onto a green turtle trailing stingers from a jellyfish he was eating. In cracks in the rock and at the bottom of the crack we found two types of pipe fish. The first kind was orange and blue and tiny, just a couple of centimeters, sharing space with the crouching shrimp we often see. The other pipefish was all white and on the bottom in the sand. One disappointment was that the reef there seemed to have been a fossil of what must have been thriving and colorful ten years before. Our dive ended with a swim with a hawksbill turtle, following him as he munched coral here and there, quite pleased to trundle along and ignore what we were doing.

Our second morning and the one after we did dives on Tokong Laut, the prize dive site of the Perhentian Islands. The dive proceeds like this. We endure a 20 minute boat ride over emerald waters then get wet and go down to 23 meters or so and find morays and funky little blue spotted rays. Eventually we come upon a bamboo shark gaping and quivering in a cave. Then we find more, maybe 4 together. There is a small cave we went to both mornings with 6 of them inside, always there, our dive guide said. They are like meercatfish, snuggled together under rocks and in caves, hiding out, possibly feeding at night, somehow surviving till next morning, then back to the shark cave.

By then we're at 17 meters, we're 30 min into the dive, and 6 min short of deco, so we come up to where the water is clearer and the coral is colorful and bright. There are so many fish here, schools of snappers, fusiliers, titan triggerfish, batfish, etc. on the reef and trevali and the occasional mackeral out in the blue. We see more morays and blue spotted rays. We are circling the pinnacle at 10 meters until we're an hour into the dive, the leader signals safety stop, and the dive goes for well over an hour. This was our first dive the second two days we dived there.

Our routine at Perhentian was to wake up around 7, decide NOT to have breakfast, and go back to sleep till 8 or 8:15, then crawl out of bed to negotiate the few steps to the dive shop outside our porch and get ready for our 9 a.m dive. That was the one to Tokong Laut our 2nd and 3rd mornings there. On return from that one we had only 45 minutes to get ready for the next one, but there's not much else to do on Perhentian unless you're keen on eating or lounging on the beach. We were there for the diving. Our second day, the dive site was at Batu Layar, the house reef just around the corner from the dive center, and we thought the briefing on what we might see there was better than the dive, which turned out to be in poor visibility until we reached the reef at the end with its interesting swim-throughs, but we didn't see much there of interest, apart from stacks of staghorn and other hard corals, and the usual calmingly tranquil schools of reef fishes.

On our third dive we went to a place called Terumbu Tiga, literally three rocks, but whose name has been bastardized to Tiger Rock. This was a nudibranch dive, with lots of warted sea slugs and the complication of currents wiping swarms of jellyfish over and around us. I recall a small pipefish in a rock. I don't recall much else, apart from constantly finding the white nudibranchs and dodging sting ray tentacles to see them. At one point one of the other divers stopped to take a picture of a pair of nudibranchs together, a jellyfish approached in the current, and I used my tank banger to divert the tentacles so they didn't pass across his cheek.

After diving we'd shower and make the walk to the beach outside our resort with its prohibitions and enjoy watching the sunset from places where these prohibitions were less stringent. One night we had dinner at the Reef bottle shop and restaurant, chinese malaysian mix, and the next night we went to the far beach for a really good meal at Tuna Resort of satays and seafood noodles and spring rolls. After Dusty and Michelle arrived with Michelle's family we started taking our meals, after briefer stops at the Reef, at our resort. Michelle's family had bought meal packages with vouchers and these vouchers seemed to cover plenty of food for all of us. Our last night there it was a barbecue of fish, squid, chicken, prawns, and some very tender chunks of meat.

Our last day of diving dawned beautiful as usual and began with Michelle and Dusty and Bobbi and I taking the speedboat into the channel between big and little Perhentian past the north point and out to the island to the north, to dive Tokong Laut, as described earlier.

The last dive of our trip was our second on that third day. Our computers were showing us 18-20 hours of no fly time and we wanted to stop and decompress and dry our gear. Michelle bowed out with a cough, so it was just Dusty, Bobbi and I on our last dive, with our kindly dive guild Marion from Koln. We chose to go to Seabell Rock, the reef west of little Perhentian that connects with the lighthouse reef. We descended right on top of an Indian Ocean Walkman, a very odd kind of scorpion fish that uses clamps beneath its pectoral fins to pull itself along the bottom like an insect. Its buggy eyes made its head look like a crocodile fish, but apart from that it was the size, shape, and color of a scorpion fish. Rounding the reef on a 60 degree heading toward the lighthouse, we found morays and blue spotted rays in the coral outcrops. We had hazy vis which improved as we crossed a sand flat on our way to the lighthouse. Here we found a rock covered in staghorn and green hard coral and teeming with fish. The vis became better the higher we circled on it and though we didn't see anything spectacular we ended our dive surrounded with fishes in a the extensive bed of staghorn coral and surprisingly amidst several boatloads of snorkelers we hadn't noticed until we were under the lighthouse near the surface.

If we compare Malapascua to Perhentian, on this trip we preferred the former, but the latter was by far the most relaxed. We slept very well at the Coral View resort (on Malapascu it was up at dawn each morning to see a thresher shark if we were lucky) but at Malapascua every dive was a fascination of small creatures and occasionally large ones. In both places we found top notch dive centers. There are a lot more people doing scuba courses in Perhentian, in fact it's an almost ideal place to learn to dive, with shallow coral near the dive center and black tips on the nearest reefs (we saw them snorkeling, babies in close to shore, and a big 2-meter monster lurking in deeper waters, which Dusty and I enjoyed seeing as it cruised the sand valleys between the coral patches). 

The dive shop did a good job of keeping the experienced divers separate from the beginners, and was able to cater to personal tastes despite having a dozen divers on a boat at times (or sometimes just us, or us and another couple). Tokong Laut gets crowded in the morning but the open water divers stay above 18 meters which leaves the bottom where where bamboo sharks are pretty much to the fewer advanced divers. The owner of Pro Divers World, Carl, is a kindly German who genuinely likes his customers and has big plans for his dive shop. He knows his business better than I do, but I liked it the way it is now :-)

Check the Pro Divers World blog at http://blog.prodiversworld.com/

Diving off Malapascua, Cebu, Philippines, June 20-23, 2012

My logged dives #1128-1138

During our stay in Malapascua we did 15 dives, the first on arrival June 18, to North Point to find a frogfish. On June 19, we did our next three, our first thresher shark dive at dawn, and then an excursion to Gato Island, followed by a swim with a whale shark off the beach from the dive center. So far so good.

We skipped the night dives on those days because we were travel-weary but we managed to get ourselves up the following morning June 20 for another dive on Monad Shoals, where again we saw a thresher shark, or its body in one part of the gloom followed a moment later by its unmistakable tail. After that encounter we returned to the beach, where sometimes the banca went all the way to shore, and at lower tides had us transfer to smaller boats. Again we were so tired we didn't book another morning dive, but went back to our room and slept instead like zombies, skipping breakfast and lunch and getting up just in time to wander down to TSD for a 2 p.m. dive. This one was a return to Monad Showls, to the side called Old Monad, where mantas had been spotted recently, so we signed up hopefully, but with realistic expectations. Mantas are elusive in general but so are thresher sharks, so it was actually a treat when we saw a thresher shark buzz the periphery of the reef. He was still in the haze, but this time we saw the complete animal in one piece, an improvement on earlier sightings, apparently unusual to see them during the day.

After our nap we were starting to feel energized again so we signed up for a night dive and I went for jog down the coast, exploring the trails far enough to reach the village past Pillar's Place on one of the coves. Bobbi and I met back at the dive center before dusk. She had gone for a walk but got lost and a motorcyclist stopped to assist and gave her a lift to Thresher Divers. She wasn't carrying money so she promised to leave some at reception. She asked how much and he said 'as you like' so we asked the dive shop staff how much to leave and followed their advice (50 pesos, a little over a dollar). We have no idea if he came back to collect it, but he probably did.  Anyway, the incident gives you an idea of how people treat each other on this pleasant island.

Despite the wealth brought in by dive tourists, most of the diving businesses are western owned, so despite the employment and boost to the local economy, there is obvious poverty on the island. My daily jogs took me eventually to the fishing villages at the far end of the island. These were in coves between rocky outcrops with trails so rocky and steep that motorcycles couldn't go there, so each was isolated apart from being easy walks from one another. They looked peaceful, though overcrowded with people living in close quarters in beach shanties, with pigs and chickens roaming on the beach, and the sea and fruit trees providing the only obvious livelihood.

We read that kids on the island would skip school to collect shells to sell to tourists, and that these items were illegal to export from the Philippines. Tourists were asked not to perpetuate this by purchasing from the truant kids, in hopes that this would help return them to school. After one meal walking back along the beach at night we came upon some kids innocently playing in the sand. One girl about ten had fallen playfully in the sand. She rolled on her back as we passed. When I looked down at her and her friends, she looked up suggestively, still half playing in the sand, and said “My pussy very good.” Bobbi and I were shocked not only at the inappropriateness of the proposition, but at the sense of paradise lost.

Better to go night diving and observe the mating habits of the randy mandy, the tiny mandarin fish that attach themselves to one another at dusk and rise up together in a puff of sperm. We spent half an hour of our night dive waiting for this to happen, and like many sex acts, weren't sure when it happened if we had seen it or not. It was at least an excuse to go night diving. On the remainder of the dive we found devil scorpion fish and large sea horses clinging to coral, always in pairs entwined about each other.

Now that we had got our energy back the rest of our stay fell into a routine of three dives a day, except we couldn't do the third dive our last day since we needed to fly the following morning from Cebu to Kuala Lumpur. Each morning, while it lasted, we were up at 4:30 to catch the banca out to Monad Shoals to try our luck with thresher sharks. The boat trips were short, about 20 minutes over placid sunrise orange-tinged green water. Monad Shoals is deep, 22-33 meters from reef top to drop-off, depending on where exactly we went on the shoals, and our minders liked to keep us 5 minutes from deco, so dives lasted only 30 minutes or so, and we'd get back to the beach near Thresher Shark Divers by 7 or 7:30. The second dive was at nine, and that might be a two-dive day trip, or one dive at 9:00 and a second dive at 2:00. I liked to go jogging when we got back from our afternoon dive, exploring and sometimes getting lost on the sand tracks, but enjoying the motorcycle tracks leading to the sea and then running into the villages where the local water-well and the school were the most popular attractions. It took about half an hour to jog the length of the island, about the right timing for holiday jogging. If I timed it right I could get back before sundown and Bobbi and I could enjoy the view of the sun sinking into the haze on the horizon from our west-facing beach where our “resort” was. Our resort, the Tepanee, whose reviews online were perhaps more effusive than we felt the resort warranted, was a property comprising of a dozen or more cottages on a low hill set amidst trees and greenery, with a path to a private beach we never visited. There was an adjacent restaurant but no other facilities available, and the wifi timed out under the most modest bandwidth loads (another thing we liked about the Blue Coral was decent wifi in our room).

The diving was always interesting. The main attraction was the thresher sharks at dawn. Bobbi said she expected we would go to a spot in clear water and kneel down or hover and watch them swirl around us, but it was not at all like that. It was a challenging dive requiring divers to watch their deco time primarily and of course guard their air consumption, though deco was usually the limiting factor. Visibility was poor on the shoals. Divers were kept behind the coral drop-offs so as to protect the habitat of the wrasse who attracted the sharks to their cleaning stations, though the sharks we saw were on the move or perhaps put off by the people they encountered, so they kept their distance, usually just at the edge of our visibility. It took a sharp-eyed dive-guide experienced in spotting them who knew what to look for. He would point into the void, and then we'd catch a glimpse of a tail or a silhouette that resolved into a thresher shark only because the guide was pointing so insistently that we could see after a couple of seconds that it was one. Other groups of divers might see two or three up close, or none. One divemaster had made 5 trips to the shoals and had never seen a shark. We were lucky in that respect. We saw them on every trip to the shoals except for one. My best sighting was toward the end of a dive at Old Monad spent peering into the silky haze, and then in front of me at 20 meters it materialized zooming in over the reef. It looked at first like a comet and it was only after a second or two that I twigged it was a shark, clearly from its tail, a thresher shark. This one was silver, and in full view, and it was my honor to bang my tank, as I saw it before Gibb, our guide, did.

We were also lucky when one afternoon we were taken out to the shoals to look for manta rays, which they said had been spotted there occasionally. On that dive I also saw a thresher shark pass above the reef. But even when we were not finding threshers there were interesting things to see in the water. The shoals were home to large colonies of garden eels. On our last dive our guide pointed out what he said were 'vipe' creatures in the anemonae, which looked like tiny pipefish wriggling between the bulbs. There were scorpion fish, and nudibranchs, and no telling what we would see on any dive. Once a guide picked up a blob of sluggish cytoplasm off the sea bed with his tank banger, and when he let is slide off midwater, it turned magically into a Spanish dancer.

The water was always a refreshing 28 degrees no matter what the depth, the temperature I like my shower on a hot day. I had a 3 mm wetsuit which I abandoned in favor of a half mm lycra and my 1 mm rash vest. I was comfortable every dive. I dived with 4 kg of weight and no air in my bcd, so I was trim with the correct weight and buoyancy.

Our least favorite dive was a wreck some distance to the north. Due to that distance we were all charged a negligible 50 peso ($1.25) fuel surcharge. The wreck was combined with a stop at Gato Island on the way back, which was interesting because Bobbi had rented a torch so she could go in the tunnel that runs from one side of the island to the other. The wreck was a bit deep for a second dive of the day, 33 meters, and so we were constantly pushing deco and had only 30 minutes on it. It was a very large wreck, a passenger ferry that had gone down in a typhoon with loss of life. Visibility was good enough that we could see most of the wreck, a good portion of its 100 meters in length. It was on its side with the high side 18 meters deep, so it was about 17 meters abeam. It was an impressive hunk of metal covered in soft corals and anemonae, but we didn't find any large animals on it and few small ones in the limited time we had there.

The tunnel at Gato Island was more interesting. There were lots of small critters inside, and one large catfish the size of a baby shark hiding in a hole. We had torches of course, so we could illuminate the marine life. Also on the large side was a huge red hairy hermit crab who'd absconded with a prize shell I had trouble grasping in my hand extended as wide as my grip would allow, so I could put it where we could see it better before letting it scramble instinctively back against the wall.

Another really nice dive was a muck dive in sea grass. This was home to colonies of red fast walking sea urchins who drew sand in off the bottom and converted it into tiny pebble-size lumps they extruded out the orange process on the top. An examination of this apparatus revealed zebra shrimp hiding in among the spines. Also on this dive we saw white banded sea snakes and a devil scorpion fish, glass spiders, many kinds of tiny shrimp, nudibranchs. On a dive later that day at Deep Rock we found a bright red frogfish and an octopus in addition to many of the other animals living in the fan coral and anemonae.

Thresher Shark Divers at Malapascua were highly professional, friendly, and accommodating. The owner Andrea was helpful via email as we planned our trip, Marian managing on site made sure all our personal and diving logistics were taken care of, and the dive guides Alex, Boyet, Gibb, and Balt were top notch and knowledgeable about what we would find underwater. They were also healthily conservative in their diving. Our groupings were small, often only Bobbi and I, sometimes one or two others. Happy hours at Oscar's upstairs from the dive center were extended for divers and somewhat addictive. A meal with plenty of tasty food and all we cared to drink was typically 1000 for the two of us, about $20, the same at Craic down the beach (both excellent meals) and half that if we ate at Ging Ging around the corner (also great food, reasonable drink prices with no need for happy hour pricing). Our favorite resort was Blue Coral at 1500 a night for a fan room, while 4 nights at the Tepanee in a smaller room cost 2,500 a night with a/c that blasted on us all night and we could have done without (we'd booked 4 nights online, in advance). At the end of 5 days of diving, 15 dives each, we paid a little over $1000, and $200 of that was for transport from Cebu hotel in a private car 3 hours to the small port at Maya, and then a banca to the island, and our stuff deposited in our room there (plus the reverse journey). So 30 dives between us cost $800, or a bit more than $25 a dive, tanks and weights (we had our own gear). The most charming thing about the place was the island itself, beaches and coves with a laid back resort strip for those with a taste for foreign food, and local hamlets and banca harbors for all the local amenities. Every dive was a good one, much recommended!