Living, food and diving
Stay was at Presidente Inter-Continental. Nice hotel, where we had a pleasant stay except for an initial attempt by them to do a bait-and- switch on our room. The hotel has a nice artificial beach with a great snorkeling area with tons of fish. We did not try too many places to eat -- the Italian restaurant in the hotel is not too bad. Pepe's in downtown is pretty good; The lobster house in the north side is overrated and best avoided. Lunch is good everywhere, with great guacamole, fresh salsa of various kinds and a habanero hot sauce on the side.
All fourteen dives were made with Dive Paradise, in their express boats. This is a fairly average outfit, reasonably managed (boats run late, dive masters just do their job, barely). No real complaints, but the service is nowhere near what we're used to from Bali (aquapro) and Puerto Galera (atlantis). We dived at the Palancar Horseshoe, Delilah, The wreck, Palancar caves, Las Palmas, Columbia reef, Punta Tunich, Paradise reef, Little horseshoe, Santa Rosa wall, Paso de Cedral (repeated some sites).
Visibility was excellent (30m+); in general, there is less coral than in Asia, more sponges, and interesting topography with plenty of swim-throughs. The highlights were a couple of sightings of nurse sharks, a six-foot spotted eagle ray, and a giant green moray eel approx 2m long, none of which came within camera range.
This is the first time I used my Inon 220s strobe with the Oly C5050 camera. The external strobe adds some difficulty -- the camera was fixed at manual, 1/125s and f/5.6 or so, and exposure was controlled by changing strobe level. So there is some trial and error making it difficult to catch moving targets (and in drift dives); also, there is no modeling light so I often had the strobe pointing the wrong way.
The images were processed using Photoshop Elements, though this page is generated using the convenient Irfanview software.
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