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The first dive site was, I believe, called “The
Dropoff”. It was aptly name. The site came up to maybe 20 feet, and
dropped down to at least 100 feet. It
was pretty vertical once you to past about 40 feet. It was very well-covered with coral, sponges,
sea fans, gorgonians and the like. There
were also a good number of fish, like schools of anthias and such. There were still plenty of nudibranchs and
such to look at, but it was definitely more of a wide-angle site. I kept swimming over and asking Rob how deep
we were (what can I say? I just don’t trust him not to go excessively
deep!). After I did this about 3 times
in the first half hour, he got really annoyed, took the gauge off, and flung it
at me. I must admit, I sort of had a
feeling that the day would end with me in possession of the single gauge.
Verde Island |
We headed back to the camp for lunch, which was quite a
spread! There was bbq chicken, a
Filipino noodle dish, some sort of fish dish, and a really tasty fruit salad. And some other stuff in there as well. After lunch, we hung out for a while, and
eventually packed up and headed out for our last dive over there. The last site, called Coral Garden, was back
on the other side of the island. We
dropped into shallow water and we were in an area with patches of reef here and
there, separated by sand. It didn’t
strike me as being that nice of a site at first. We were swimming around a bit, when Rob
pointed out to me that the leak alarm on his camera was going off. Ruh-roh.
I thumbed it, but he seemed unconvinced that it required aborting the
dive. Oddly, it seemed like I was way
more concerned about it than he was. I
guess he could see in the housing that there was just a little moisture. So no pictures from this dive. Even though I was initially pretty meh about
the site, we eventually ended up in a much denser area, and it was a really
nice dive. It was a gently sloping reef,
with a good number of fish, and I spent a lot of time nudi-peeping, and had a
fun time with that. We ended up in an
area that was about 20 feet deep, and we spent at least the last 20 minutes of
the dive there. When it was finally time
to end the dive, I thumbed it, and Rob was acting weird, asking what depth we
should stop at. I couldn’t understand
why we needed any sort of stops at all when we were at 20 feet for most of the
dive. I finally remembered that he had
no gauge, and was just asking what depth we were at.
When we surfaced, it had become pretty overcast, and started
raining shortly after that. It was a
pretty wet ride back to the resort. When
we got back, we found that we had plenty of time to make the night dive, and
even some time to warm up beforehand.
For the night dive, we were going blue-ring-octopus hunting. We went to a site called Small La Laguna,
just off to the left from the resort. We
did not succeed in finding a blue ring octopus, but this was an awesome macro
dive. We saw a pipe seahorse,
(non-flamboyant) cuttlefish, a leaf scorpionfish, some other more “normal”
looking scorpionfish, and of course a variety of little crabs, shrimp,
flatworms, and nudibranchs. I found a
Cerberilla affinis, which I was pretty happy with, since it was unlike any
other slugs we’d seen yet. We did see
one octopus, but it wasn’t blue-ring; I’m actually not sure what it was.