malapascua

OK let's see,  it's around 8 pm on monday and we're going to do the thresher shark dive tommorrow morning at 530am..this is going to be great!!!! then it's off for a 2 dive day trip ahh I cannot wait. We saw a seamoth today, very cool, sort of looks like a seahorse with too many after market parts, can't really swim properly, just sort of bumps along the bottom.
   Travel has been somewhat difficult here, the distances are far and there are not a lot of airports and things have been late. The slow boat from el nido (8 hours ) was 3 hrs late, so again we were looking for a place to stay in coron after dark. OK so the diving in coron was pretty good, lots of wrecks, not sure we're big wreck fans...dive deep for a short amount of time and then come up, looking at pretty much nothing, But we did dive barracuda lake, so... 30ft of fresh water at about 85F, then 30 ft of brackish water at about 105F, and the rest sea water at 82F. Sort of like the grand canyon underwater with shrimp and catfish and really hot water, very beautiful.
  We stayed in coron for 4 days and decided to jet to malapascua to see the sharks. So you take a van from town and travel for about 45 minutes to the airport, which is just on the other side of the broken cattle crossing. We had this 5 hr lay over in manila before our flight to cebu ( yes there again ) but it turns out our flight was 4 hrs late , so there was some rushing involved. Overnight in cebu after getting some more money ( they only took cash jn coron) snacks and yes ..vodka. The next morning we got a van for a 3 hr ride to maya, a 1/2 hr boat to malapascua and we're here!!! That's all for travel , we're here till we fly to japan...so a week.
   Again for you non divers, this is just blah, blah , blah. The diving hasn't been great, there's alot of divers here, enough that we have come up with a underwater sign for cluster fuck. The visibility has been average, but we have been seeing really cool stuff...we have been seeing pipefish so regularly that it's almost boring, but it's not. We saw a burrowing sea cucumber, well lots of them, a long lure frogfish, ornate ghost pipefish, ornate filefish, seriously stuff from the dive magazines you just never see.
  Ok it's 9pm now and I need to go to bed, and well I'm at the bar outside our hotel and it's starting to rain, so way I go. Now that we have a somewhat regular schedule we will blog more.

Love and warm thoughts from Malapasqua

Carrie, Erica and Glen