Anilao 2024: Day 3

We woke to (finally) sunny conditions and lake flat conditions on the water, phew. For the first dive of the day, we went across the channel to a site called Bethlehem. It started around 20 feet and sloped down to about 65 feet, where there was a side flat rubble field, which was a treasure trove of macro critters! Joemar found so many tiny slugs, probably between 10 and 15 different kinds, mostly presented to us on a silver plate for photography :P. There were also some good crabs and shrimps, including one of the ones that lives on a wire coral, and some popcorn shrimp in one of those bulbous anemones.

Between dives we headed to the next site, called Layag, and hung out on the boat during the surface interval. Eventually we finally got back in. This site was super awesome, with beautiful coral heads covered with anthias and other tropical fish. There were zillions of crinoids in all different colors. It would have made for a great wide angle dive. Rob was shooting macro, though, and there were tons of great subjects. Joemar found a boxer crab right at the start (the ones with pompoms on their paws), plus there was a frogfish, a blue and yellow ribbon eel, a mantis shrimp, lots of nudis, and a dancing sweetlips. Overall a great dive site, one of the nicer patches of reef I’ve seen on this trip or our previous one here.

After lunch and a non-nap, we went back out to a spot very close to the hotel, right at the point. It was around where we did the night dive last night. The site was a slope down to 75 or so feet with patches of coral, but more patches than not patches. Actually the slope continues a bit deeper but it thins out to mostly sand. We spent a lot of time down around 75 feet. The highlight of the dive was a sea fan with not one but two Pygmy seahorses! They were the pinkish purple ones that I think are prettier than the one we’d seen yesterday. And one of the two was pretty big, well as big as I think they come. I could see it pretty well with my eyes. Joemar found these pretty early in the dive and Rob kept going back to the sea fan to get a few more pics.

Other than this, we saw a variety of nudis, and one small one that looked like it had only a single rhinophore. It was actually a non-nudi slug, a head-shielded slug known as a batwing slug. It was tiny with big spots, pretty cool looking for a non-nudibranch :P. One other find on the dive was some tiny eel type thing that was slithering around in a coral. Joemar says it had a bulbous head (I could just see its head was white versus a black or dark red body) but I don’t think Rob managed to get a pic. One other notable thing about this dive was that Rob got very low on gas and I had to share gas with him back to the boat. How embarrassing. When we surfaced the wind had picked up and little waves were breaking over my head. Luckily it was only like 2 minutes back to the hotel.

We hung out at the pool for a while and then headed back out for a night dive. The wind had calmed down. We went to a site around the point and a few minutes past it. It was a sandy slope it wasn’t the most productive dive. There was a lot of swimming around not finding anything but there were a few good finds. Very early on, Joemar found a small but not tiny octopus slithering around on the sand. And much later, after a lot of not seeing much, he found a really cool nudi on a hydroid, which I know we’ve seen before in the Philippines. But while we were looking at that, a tiny translucent squid suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Rob miraculously managed to actually get some shots of it, even though it looked like sea trash drifting in the water. We saw a second one of those tiny translucent squids a bit later, which looked even more like a tiny bit of sea trash. Other than that, there were a few other nudis and the usual assortment of small crabs and shrimp.

Tonight I had a pina colada.

Anilao 2024: Day 2

When we woke up, it was like we were in the middle of a hurricane. It was raining and windy and there were crazy gusts. The rain stopped before we went for breakfast and the wind slowly decreased as we were getting ready to go. We headed across the channel to Kirby’s Rock, which I remembered from our previous trip once the briefing started. I remembered thinking it would be a good place for wide angle but Rob had packed macro. Oh well. Anyway, it was windy but not too crazy by the time we left, and the ride over was okay.

At first the dive site was rubble reef and I couldn’t remember what I thought was so great about the site. But I guess this was just on the way to the main spot. We poked around and found a few critters on the way to the big side pinnacle down the slope. Once we got over to there I noticed both of the guides down in a crack and saw a big coral-colored sea fan, and realized they were looking for a Pygmy seahorse. So I hung nearby in case it worked out. And it did! There was a teeny teeny tiny little Pygmy seahorse in there, which Joemar miraculously managed to find! Once he found it, it seemed like Rob spent like most of the dive trying to get that shot. I guess macro was the right lens for the dive.

Aside from the Pygmy, Joemar found a very pretty little orange and pink and white slug that I’ve seen once before and for some reason I really like, though it’s probably not objectively the most amazing slug. I just like the color combination. Aside from slugs, I saw a couple different scorpionfish on the dive, and a zillion little moral eels, including several free swimming. Oh and when we made it to the main rock, there were a ton of little tropical fish zooming around, and the overhang on the wall was very cool. Plus there was a cute bugger frogfish hanging on the side of the wall. I still think it would be a good site for wide angle though macro was the right lens for today!

After that we went to the next site and anchored and hung out there for a while for our surface interval. The water had turned totally flat during the first dive, which was nice. The site was Olympic point (named for the nearby hotel), and it was a muck dive with a sandy bottom with scattered little coral bits. It was an insanely productive macro dive. There was a cool pair of nudis and their eggs in a coral egg bubble (which kind of blew my mind), a leaf scorpionfish, a black ribbon eel, and that was all within like one 10 foot stretch. We saw tons of cool little crabs and shrimp in anemones, corals, and on the backs of urchins. By the end of the dive, there were some patches of blue sky, finally, though I still wouldn’t call it sunny.

We came back for lunch and rested a bit before heading back out. I had the club sandwich for lunch which was excellent. Rob was less excited by his burger. For the afternoon dive, we did a muck dive about 5 minutes to the right of the resort, at a site called Vivire. It was once again quite productive. Joemar told us that we would likely see the cousin of Shaun the sheep that was green and blue, and oh buy did we see those. Rob spent so much time photographing them. Some of them were big enough to really look at with my eyes, which was nice. The one really good find on this dive was an octopus with a single blue ring (can’t remember what it’s called). We also saw an armina looking slug that was biggish and lots of small nudis that I couldn’t identify with my eyes.

We got back a little before 5 and decided to hang out by the pool until the night dive. Then we headed out just to the point where we tried to dive yesterday (Mainit). We got in just before dark. The reef sloped down to around 60 feet and had patches of reef. It looked like it would be a nice site to dive during the day too. We saw lots of good critters on the dive… plenty of nudis, a huge harlequin shrimp, a squid, a frogfish, lots of cool crabs and shrimps, and the reef was seemingly covered with these huge and very creepy basket stars.

We got back and headed down to dinner a little before 8. Actually we hit the bar first, where I got a mango daiquiri (yum).

Anilao 2024: Day 1

We got to the hotel around 9am, so we got checked in and did the 11am dive. There were three other divers on our boat (an Italian family) who had just done there checkout dive in the morning. We attempted to go dive just at the point to the left of the hotel, but visibility was apparently not good enough so we went back past the hotel just a couple minutes away and dove a site that was called Twin Rocks, I think. The site was a slope with patchy coral, we were around 50 to 60 feet for most of the dive, but came up shallower on the return.

Our guide found tons of critters, so even though there were some spots with nice little walls or coral heads, we pretty much had our heads buried looking for macro stuff. We saw a bunch of nudibranchs of varying sizes, I think I only found boring dorids, but our guide did a better job. There were also some cool tiny shrimp and crabs. I found several small morays, including one that was free swimming, and there was a yellow ribbon eel! My best find of the dive was a stonefish. Rob was not as impressed as I was (probably because the fish was facing the wrong direction to really get a good pic) but I insisted he take a pic for documentation purposes. We also saw a dancing sweetlips. When we surfaced, conditions had gotten super snotty and wind waves were breaking over our heads as we got out of our gear next to the boat. That was kind of unexpected to me, since it was really flat when we got in.

We went back to the resort and had lunch. Rob had sisig of course and I had some veggie noodles. We went back to our room to rest for a while, and during that time, the weather really deteriorated. It started to rain and was crazy windy. The rain stopped by the time for our next dive, but it was still quite windy. Getting on the boat was interesting.

We headed across the channel to do a dive called Apol Reef, but it turned out to be too much current there, so we went to a muck dive site nearby. This was probably my preference anyway. This dive was great. We saw tons of Shaun the sheep nudis, which Rob is obsessed with, two little frogfish (one orange and one black), some pipefish, a seahorse, a non-flamboyant cuttlefish, and tons of nudis. Some very small aeolids. Woot. I found a neat little fish with a long dangly lure thing sticking out of its head. I think that was my best find of the dive, only because Joemar did all of the good finding on the dive. One notable thing about this dive was that it seemed to be at the junction of two masses of water, one that was definitely colder than the other. You could see a shimmering layer where the two met in a couple of places, but mostly you could just feel it.

We decided to pass on the evening dive, since I was kind of tired. After a bit of relaxing, we went to the bar and had mango coladas. Yummm. Then we headed to dinner, where we had chicken adobo, grilled liempo (pork belly) and veggie chop suey.

Antarctica 2023

Way back in early 2019, GUE announced that they were organizing a trip to Antarctica, in February 2021.  Clinton, John, Rob, and I had been talking about figuring out a way to dive in Antarctica for several years, so when the announcement went out, we jumped on it right away and secured our spots on the boat.  Of course the 2021 trip was canceled due to COVID, and rescheduled for 2022.  We almost went in 2022, then the Omicron surge happened, and well, it was canceled again.  At long last, in January 2023, we had a trip that was NOT canceled, almost 4 years after we initially booked the trip!

It was a LONG trip, even though we were only in Antarctica for 5 days, I think the total trip was 16 days.  I was a bit nervous about leaving Pepper for so long, but luckily Kevin and Ted each agreed to stay at the house for a few days while we were gone, spaced out so that Pepper never had to go that long with just the cat-sitter (and of course Pepper was fine).

The play-by-play:

Getting to Ushuaia and Ushuaia

From Ushuaia to Antarctica

Day 1: Gerlache Strait, Orne Harbour

Day 2: Gerlache Strait, Cuverville Island, Danco Island

Day 3: Lemaire Channel, Port Charcot, Yalour Islands

Day 4: Foyn Harbour

Day 5: Deception Island

Back across the Drake Passage

Less than a Day in Buenos Aires

A Day(-ish) in Buenos Aires

Recoleta Cemetary

 Since we had to fly through Buenos Aires anyway, we decided to spend a day there on the way back instead of more time in Ushuaia.  We got there late at night and left in the early evening the next day.  So we had a morning and afternoon there, and no chance to eat dinner.  Since it was the summer, it was hot.  So I don't think it was a bad thing that we didn't get to stay longer.  We spend the day walking around a bit and visiting Recoleta Cemetary, a street market, and eating a little bit of street food.

The airport was kind of a nightmare, but on the plus side, once we finally managed to get checked in (the nightmarish part) and through security, they had a variety of tasty empanadas at the American lounge :)

Back across the Drake

The trip back across the Drake was definitely sportier than on the way south, though nothing too bad.  But the outside decks were closed for about a day and a half of the passage, and lots of people disappeared into their rooms because they were seasick.  On the worst night, it was a bit hard to sleep, just because of all of the movement -- I remember waking up in the middle of the night and feeling like I was swinging from head to toe.  It was also kind of annoying to get around the boat on one afternoon.  On Thursday, there were 4 lectures, all of which I attended — one I can’t remember (?), one on how whales play a role as “ecosystem engineers” (by moving nutrients from the deep to the surface, so phytoplankton can bloom), one on penguin evolution, and one on “human impacts on the polar regions”.  The last one was really more a presentation on how penguin populations have changed over the past 40 or so years, and then various conversation topics, including plastic pollution and cetacean entanglement/by-catch.  We also did a debrief on the diving operations with Faith.

I took no pictures of the scenery on the trip back (probably because the decks were closed for so much of it), but here is a nice picture of the last dinner aboard, which was kind of a fancy affair.

Antarctica 2023: Day 5: Deception Island

In the morning we went to Deception Island (in the Shetland Islands), which involved passing “Neptune’s Bellows” on the way in and out. We saw the bellows from our port holes but were too lazy to go out on deck that early in the morning to get a better view. Deception Island is sort of C-shaped, and you have to pass through this narrowing to get inside of the C and that’s where you land, dive, etc. The island used to be used by whalers for processing whales, and so it has a bunch of buildings/artifacts from that time, and tons of whale bones both on the beach and underwater. The interesting shape of the island/bay is because it is an old volcano caldera, so all of the sand and rock is volcanic. It’s the blackest black sand beach I’ve ever been to.

The dive was on a black sand slope and was advertised as a whale bone graveyard, or some such thing. There were indeed whale bones, but I would call this a muck dive, as there was also tons of life on the slope. There were (not too interesting) brittle stars and urchins all over the slope and the bones. But there were also lots of nice-looking anemones, star fish, more of those cream-colored dorids. And we found two of the giant sticky-footed (?) starfish, one of which was posing with several of its arms raised. Those things are so neat, even cooler than the sunflower stars (formerly) in Monterey! Clinton also found the first “big” fish that I’d seen on the trip, which was apparently an antarctic cod. Though I think it was way too cute to be a cod. Overall it was a very fun dive. When Clinton got cold and called the dive, we worked our way up the slope and finished in about 15 feet.

Afterward, we went to shore, where there were some chinstrap penguins right along the water. There were some buildings we could go and look at, but at the very opposite end of the beach was a southern elephant seal pup, so we made the long walk over to see him. We watched for quite a while, as the pup hung out on his back, in a pretty un-photogenic pose. Just as we were about to leave, he finally flopped over and did some cute things… like a big yawn, scratching his back, scratching his ankle, and also just looking at us.

We headed to Half Moon Island in the afternoon, which was a 4 hour motor from Deception Island. Unfortunately when we got there, there were 40+ knot winds and no place to put the boat so we could deploy the zodiacs. So after a bit of faffing around trying to make it work, we headed out of there and towards the Drake Passage.