A day I’d happily relive … in a different way!

Two of the girls came down with food poisoning at 0400 and weren’t able to make the dive trip. They had shared two meals. Fortunately the rest of us ate something different. For breakfast, Karsten and I grabbed some bread and cakes from the local bakery to accompany the free coffee from the hotel. He also got some chocolate spread which I expected to be like Nutella but it was actually chocolate-flavoured margarine which was pretty revolting.

The remaining healthy bods meet at the dive shop and were tendered out into a large diving Bangka equipped with its own compressor, kitchen and cook. The divers comprised of fun divers, refreshers, Advanced course student, an instructor on holiday.

With so many types, organisation appeared a bit haphazard. It was made worse as we could only the water one-by-one using the great stride forward rather than the simultaneous backroll.

• My first dive at Helicopter Island was pretty crap. Visibility was poor at around 10m due to plankton. Plankton is fine if it brings in the only resident whale-shark but that wasn’t mean to be. There wasn’t very much fish; all were pretty standard small stuff. There was some nice hard coral but it was hard to enjoy in the poor light (due to shadow of the cliff-like islands) and the plankton.
• The second dive at Taglugaban was similar except that there was a very good maze-like rock formation and a bit more fish.

Overall it was a very disappointing day for me, but not so for some of the others. I’d happily relive it doing something else.  Having dived Sipadan, there’s really not much else in the diving world that I can enjoy.  Also, the water was surprisingly cold; I always thought Philippines was tropical!

We spoke to some people on the beach and got an idea of how nasty the 5-6 year old unsupervised local kids can be. These boys and girls throw sand in the faces of visitors whenever something annoys them, eg. when told not to kick the stray dog or when told “No, you can’t take my handbag”!!!