Underwater Love!

After an exhausting travel to Southern Leyte, we were once more rewarded with a priceless dive experience!

Just like during our first trip to Padre Burgos we were fortunate to meet a marine biologist cum dive master who turned out to be our dive buddy for the weekend. Formerly working for Coral Conservation Cay, Hew was back to Southern Leyte to reminisce his days with the foundation.

Having the eye of a dive master and vast local knowledge of the dive sites he spotted the most remarkable micro life, which Southern Leyte dive spots are famous for! The most fascinating for me was—without doubt—to see mating nudibranchs! Some of those “sea slugs” are so tiny it’s rather hard to spot them in the first place. To see them mate was an absolute highlight! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an underwater sea-slug-sex-pervert! The act of reproduction is, for (almost all) animals and plants, purely to sustain the species – the very essence of nature. It was such a life-defining yet intimate act to witness that I feel truly grateful to have seen it! I mean, how many times do we have the opportunity to peep into nature's bedroom?

Another highlight was to see the manta ray which we were told “hangs out” at a certain spot but has not been seen regularly. Expecting little we got the most: he hovered around our small dive group twice!

The school of dolphins jumping in front of our dive boat and chasing us on the way back to shore was an unexpected add-on to our dive experience we gladly would have paid for.

After each dive we tried to identify the creatures we saw by going through various dive books along with our underwater pictures… sometimes we were so engrossed our dinner got cold. It’s amazing how little we know about the world beneath sea level!

Call it knowledge or trivia (I guess that depends on the eye of the beholder) but did you know that:

• Tiger nudibranchs eat each other? Unbelievable! Those little, colorful, and cute creatures!
• Some nudibranchs grow as big as 30 centimeters (bigger than a man’s hand!)? And we’ve seen two of them, almost choking on our regulators!
• Tunicates have a spine-like structure, thus are “closely related to vertebrates, which include fish and all land animals with bone”? Crazy!
• The area around Sogod Dive Resort lost three dive sites in the last two years due to inappropriate fishing techniques (mainly net fishing which destroys the corals by dragging a net on the bottom of the ocean)?
• I love to see more MPAs (Marine Protected Areas, not to be confused with the Motion Picture Association!), which in Padre Burgos three of the operating dive resort set up to rehabilitate the underwater life and educate local fisher folk?
• The local government does little to nothing to support (dive) tourism in the area but instead makes life hard for the existing or interested investors? Local politics!

The tourism experience in the Philippines is really a mixed bag, a box of chocolates where you never really know what you’ll get. Stunning natural beauty goes along with the most devastating and ignorant fishing, farming, and waste-burning practices.

I like to think that well educated local dive masters take back to their communities the knowledge, which will slowly but truly convert ignorance into competence.