Wave Shape
Wave Shape

Club Trip to Puerto Galera, Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines

Waves Shape

This was a club trip taken by four club members, organised by Bryan

From the holiday: Gallery  John’s photos. Clive’s photos

We flew to Manila, via Abu Dhabi, this consisted of an 8 hour flight, followed by another of around 9 hours.

Our expected arrival was too late for transport to the resort that evening, so we stayed overnight in Manila and spent the evening investigating the city and finding somewhere for a meal and a drink.

The following morning we had a taxi booked to the port where we caught our water taxi which dropped us directly in front of Scandi Divers, our dive centre.

Accommodation was in large twin rooms, overlooking the sea.

Diving took place from reasonable sized local style boats with outriggers. Throughout the holiday we often shared the boat with 2 Scottish divers, there were never more than 4 divers in addition to us, meaning that the boat was never crowded.

All dive sites were within a 15 minute boat ride, so after each dive we returned to the dive centre, where, between dives we could chill and have lunch, before going out for the afternoon dive.

Diving was a mix of coral reefs and “muck” diving, with one wreck, which had been sunk as an artificial reef.

This area seems to have a particularly large number & variety of nudibranchs, we were seeing dozens of them on almost every dive. We saw quite a few green turtles and a couple of hawksbill ones. We saw quite a few sea snakes (kraits). Our guide regularly found pigmy sea horses on the fan corals, there was the occasional mantis shrimp and all the usual reef inhabitants.

Away from the coral in the sandy areas were sea pens & stargazer eel and some flatfish.

We did take a trip to the nearby Verde island for a day of slightly different diving and a barbeque

We took a couple of breaks from the diving through the holiday, one day we had a guided tour round the locality, visiting Tamaraw falls, a mangrove swamp and a traditional village.

 

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