Underwater Images from Puerto Galera, April 2007


Living, Food and Diving:
Easter break this year was a long one -- enough to make a quick trip to Puerto Galera for three days of diving. We went with some relatives, who were taking scuba lessons. We stayed as before in Atlantis -- the resort has upgraded pretty much all facilities, but somehow lost the spirit that they earlier had: we probably will not stay there any more on subsequent trips to PG.

The restaurant at Atlantis is still serving pretty good food -- especially the pizzas and fresh fruit juices. Still the best food on the Island, we think.

We did nine dives in three days. Atlantis now gives free nitrox fills, and we used nitrox on a couple of deeper dives. The sites we dove included Monkey beach, Kilima steps, Sabang wreck, SinanDigan wall, Ernie's point, Canyons, Batangas channel. Water temp was a decent 29 degrees, though visibility was 15 m or so. Diving activity in PG has increased dramatically, but somehow the reef life seems to have been better than our last trip, if anything.

The thumbnails below link to larger images that'll pop up on a new page. Kitty was shooting with her Canon S80 in the WP-DC1, while this was my second trip with the Canon G7 in the WP-DC11 housing: this setup is useless without an external strobe; I was running my trusty Inon Z220s in slave mode. This time I experimented with running all images (I think) at Shutter priority and fixed at 1/125. In the end, I think the best mode would be to run full manual, 1/125 and f/8, adjusting the strobe power for exposure. Will try that on the next trip.



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If you want the original of any of these, send me email.