Romblon is a tiny Island (actually, a group of three Islands, Tablas, Romblon and Sibuyan) to the East of the Southern end of Mindoro (the Island with Puerto Galera). It's not far from HK, but getting there is slow: HK [fly] Manila [car] Clark [fly] Tablas [car] San Agustin [boat] Romblon [3-wheeler] 3P Resort. Each step is 1-2 hours, but the change times make it into an almost full day of travel. We stayed at the 3P Resort - run by three German brothers who have lived there for ~15 years. The resort is pretty comfortable considering that the island is basically small and remote. It's right on the shore, and has a decent dive shop. Each room is sort of a stand-alone beach-bungalow, there is hot water (much needed since it was a rainy winter and we were a bit cold after the diving). The resort is fairly well maintained, and it was a pleasant and relaxed stay for us.
The Food
The kitchen at the resort is run by a German, David, who also has been with the resort for over 5-6 years as of this trip. So the food was quite good, and somewhat
European style. The daily routine was: breakfast (eggs, hearty German style breads, cereal, fruit, coffee/tea) at around 7:30-8am, depart for two morning dives,
lunch (typically asian/western dishes, e.g. spaghetti, burgers, asian curries and veggies, rice), 3 pm third dive, dinner around 7pm (asian/western dishes, quite hearty;
for example, one day they roasted a full chicken with potaotes for each couple, together with soup and some super sweet desserts). Overall, food was excellent considering the location.
Diving:
We were signed up for 12 dives, but ended up doing 11 dives in 4.5 days: day 1 (1 check dive), day 2 (one AM dive, and one PM dive), days 3-4 (3 dives each), day 5 (two AM dives).
The water temp was around 26-28C, but I was cold on many dives. It was raining at least for some time on almost all days we were there, although we were lucky and
there were also some sunny periods. There was occasionally some small current, maybe less than 0.5knot, but since we were mostly doing super-macro, even the small current
could make things a it challenging. In principle, there are over 20 dive sites going along the coast, north or south from 3P; however we probably did all our diving
in 3-4 areas, going slightly North-west towards bon-bon beach and around it towards logbon Island. All sites were 15min or so away by bangka.
About the photos
Gear: Sony A7 IV camera in Nauticam housing and the 28-60 lens, with a Subsea +10 and inon 165 macro wet lens added for most macro photos; Inon Z220 strobe in optical slave. Kitty made some videos with her GoPro Hero 12 black and AdventureX 8000 lumen video lamp.
