Underwater Images, Puerto Galera, April 2009
Living, Food and Diving:
Our earlier bad experience with Atlantis, plus the recently
discovered joys of muck diving in Anilao, I wasn't expecting to find myself in PG anytime soon. However, Kitty's boss
Roger threw a spanner in that plan by becoming a part owner of the La Laguna Beach Club,
and invited us for a stay in its newly constructed Hepper wing. So we put together a gang of six (Daniel and Ben,
Lita and Wilson and the two of us) and hopped on to the discounted Philippines Air for a quick trip over Easter.
La Laguna is fairly large, and I find it's location away from the rather overdeveloped
Sabang area to be a plus. It has a nice beach in front, though not much of a house reef. The rooms are nice. We stuck
mostly to the resort, except for one interesting foray into the Sabang nightlife: Roger, Analyn, Lita, Daniel and Tim were
judges for the bikini, ahem, talent, competition at the local disco bar. The talent portion involved solo dances
inspired by Britney Spears' raunchier routines, wardrobe malfunctions and all. Daniel is still complaining that
contestant #8 won by public applause, over his favored #12.
Food: We mostly ate in the resort rstaurant. The highlights are the fresh mango juice. Food is
ordered off the menu, and we found that contrary to Anthony Bourdain's advice, the best thing to do was to stick with
the daily special, especially if it involved prawns. The chef also improvised his
Aussie sausage dish for me, spicing it up really nicely by stuffing red chillies inside.
Diving: We made eleven dives: a night dive on the day we arrived, and then 3, 4, and 3
over the next three days. The dive sites were selected as mostly simpler ones, since the group had people of
different abilities. Our excellent guide was Victor (and during the stay we heard other guests say good stuff
about other DM's at La Laguna also, so good job to the dive shop there). On most dives, resort partner Tim also
dived with us to help out with the beginners -- an unbelievable act of kindness, that left me and Kitty free chase to
wander around looking for marine life and photos. On the second day, Roger was nice enough to
take us on his personal speedboat to Verde Island for a great dive at the drop off: we returned by 11am and did
three more dives locally. The sites we dived: Monkey beach, Sabang wrecks, Clams, Manila channel,
Shark cave, Verde Island drop off, clams (night), Sabang point, West Escarcio, Hole in the wall. Water was
around 27C, visibility ranged from 15m to 20m, and mostly mild currents, if any.
The thumbnails below link to larger images that'll pop up in a new page/tab. Kitty was shooting with her Canon S80
in the WP-DC1, and I am still using my Canon G7 in the WP-DC11 housing with an Inon Z220s in optical slave mode.
If you want the original of any of these, send me email.
