Mindoro and the hairy frogfish

It seems Mindoro has become part of our backyard. We've been there so many times we've lost count. Mindoro to us is a convenient weekend getaway. A beach and dive destination mere 3 hours away from our doorstep. With a 5:45am ferry service we can stay until Monday and still be in the office on time!

We've dived pretty much every dive site (except for the Verde Island passage which is on our to-do list for the next time we got here). We thought we've seen it all. We hadn't! Neither above water nor submerged!

Last weekend we decided to explore the bays farther away from Sabang Beach and its obvious "niche" clientele (however closer to the dive sites). This time we took the ferry to Tamaraw Beach! We stayed at Luca's, a simple but acceptable accommodation with exceptional Italien cuisine! I haven't had such a great (in size and taste) pizza in ages!

And more. We explored the nearby Mangyan Village which is being restored with the help of Ayla Foundation. Past the village is a waterfall. The trail is not difficult or hard to find. The drizzle, which turned into a heavy rainstorm at night, had turned it into a challenging mudslide. We managed and Glenn took a bath.

Rain and wind is a diver's biggest enemy (next to sharks, I guess). Not because one could get wet... but because the waves stir up the bottom of the ocean and visibility usually drops. We had adjusted our expectations accordingly. But wow! We were treated with some of the most unusual underwater creatures!

We saw two Cockatoo Waspfishs (if I can trust Google Image) hanging out right next to each other. They look like leaves and when they move they look a dead leave being brushed over the sandy bottom of the sea.

Next was a juvenile cuttlefish, trying hard to not be seen. Hard to imagine this 2-inch blob of purple something can grow into a rather massive cuttlefish.

Not as small as the pygmy seahorse but equally fragile in looks was the lonely seahorse we saw. Clinging its tail around the almost non-existing vegetation it kept its position in the current.
When my tank was almost down to 50 bar we heard the noise signal of our partner divers. They've obviously found something interesting! We tried to locate them... not easy underwater where the direction of sound is hard to identify.

Then we finally saw them and their excited faces (visible even under their masks)! They had found a hairy frog-fish! We've seen frog-fishes in different colors and sizes before. This one looked like a Rastafarian! His "hair" was literally floating in the current. It's amazing what lives below sea level! And it's amazing how a low expectation dive can turn out!

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.