Diving and Trips

Overall, we had a great time with muck diving searching for tiny critters. When you are tired of sieving black sand, there is alway corals, jacks and barracuda at Masaplod, Basak and Guinsuan area. Besides diving the various sites along the Dauin coast, we took day trips to Apo Island and Siquijor Island. Wall drift dives with jacks at Apo Island, great hard and soft coral formations, fantastic visibility at Siquijor with a bunch of spanish dancers. This place is definitely no lack of critters ... it was one trip which I spotted the most no of ornate ghost pipefish, robust ghost pipefish, thorny seahorse, hairy squat lobsters, crinoid shrimps, lots of mantis shrimps, warty frogfish, juv frogfish (1cm and smaller), ambon scorpionfish, thousands of garden eels at secret corner ( i literally meant thousands ... ), really large school of coral shrimpfish at Basak ... etc Of special mention that was a first time sighting for me would be the - mushroom pipefish, which looked like long white worms in the anemone. - spider crab on yellow seafan - thin ghost pipefish Mandarinfish dives - Eilin and I had done mandarinfish dives in other locations (lembeh, palau ...etc). So my initial thoughts were "Well OK! Been There, Done That" but let's take a look again. However, I must say that this is by far the best mandarinfish dive we did to-date. In fact, it was so good that we did it for 3 consecutive nights. The mandarin fishes here were so active. On each dive, we could easily witness (at least 3-4 times or more) their mating rituals of coming together and rising in mid-waters. They were obviously not shy !! Maybe they were less intimated by our red LED focus light compared to normal white light :> Yes, it does sounds like an excuse to justify buying more high-tech gear ... but it REALLY WORKS ! Besides being an excellent mandarinfish site, Bahura is also a fantastic site for night dive as it was shallow (5-10m) and sheltered from current. We also encountered friendly pygmy cuttlefish, witnessed a moray eel in the sea grass preyed on a sleeping fish for dinner, lots of hermit crabs and shrimps, pair of squids, pair of juv shaded batfish, tiger cowies ...etc On the last night dive, we did a "Bio-luminance" dive. Basically, we have an orange visor over our mask and had a torch with a blue spectrum light. It was quite an experience, the nudibranch turned black with a luminous skirt, sea-lices where luminous orange in soft coral. The brain coral had uniform speckled luminous squares. Eilin found a anenome which which had long whips like a flower ... which looked like the Avatar Movie - Tree of Life. Darn, I missed that !! Basically soft corals gave off the most impressive effect, and if only we could find one of those translucent nudibranches, I am sure it would look out-of-this-world. Next DIY project ... Orange filter for my camera port !! Blue filter for my strobe !! Diving conditions were not considered PERFECT during our trip. There were strong winds prior and on the first 2 days of our trip, which stirred up the vis quite a bit. Vis was getting better on the later part of the trip and we can only imagine doing muck diving in aquarium clear water without currents ... apparently that happens during July to Sep !