Anilao 2018: Day 1

At last it was time to go diving, woot woot.  We got our gear setup and met our dive guide for the week, Elmer, before breakfast and then we headed to the dining room to have breakfast.  There was a breakfast buffet every morning.  There were two things on the buffet (most mornings) which were pretty awesome: 1) mango juice and 2) fresh mangoes.  Rob ate his weight in mangoes every morning (until they ran out of mangoes for a couple days, which I am pretty sure Rob was singlehandedly responsible for).

Eventually it was time for our first dive, which was at the closest dive site, just to the left of the hotel.  I believe they call this site Buceo Point.  It consisted of scattered coral heads.








The second dive of the day was in front of the hotel where we transferred from van to boat yesterday for the ride to the resort, and the site was called "Secret Bay".  This was a muck dive, there was a slope which upon an initial look seemed like there wasn't much there but sand, but in fact there were lots of little bits of junk that critters were on and around.





For the third dive of the day (after lunch), we went looking for pygmy seahorses.  And we managed to find two!!  They were the darker pink ones (rather than the more orange-y pink ones that I've seen before).  I think that Elmer found more on the same sea fan, but we could only manage to see two of them.  That was plenty.  Rob spent quite a bit of time taking their pictures.  They kept hiding behind branches of the sea fan, and re-finding them was kind of driving me nuts :P

For the night dive (which we left around 6 for), we went back to Secret Bay, which was an awesome night dive and also a very conveniently short boat ride back to the resort.

Once we got back, we went to dinner and then went to the bar (which is in the middle of the resort just above the beach) for a drink.  I tried to order a pina colada, but they were out of pineapple.  So instead the bar tender suggested a mango colada, which is a million times better than any pina colada I've ever had :)