Underwater Images Subic Bay, Philippines


Living, Food and Diving:
We made a quick 5-day trip to Subic Bay in Philippines during Easter break, 2010. The main attraction for Kitty was the marine park, where one can make a dive (for ~US$100) with dolphins and a false killer whale. There is plenty of real diving, too; most of it on various wrecks from the second world war. The town is ~3 hours by road west of Manila. We were in a rather large group (~30 people), most of whom stayed at a resort called Johan's ; we stayed in an adjacent resort called Treasure Island . I can't recommend any sane person to stay at either of these places -- the rooms are pretty poor, the facilities bare, and the food below par. They qualify more as 'last resort' than 'resort'.

Our breakfast and lunch were part of the package, at Johan's; pretty ordinary. For dinner, we would hoof it 10-15 mins down the Baloy long beach road to one of the other hotels which were ok. On the last day we walked out a bit longer to the National highway to eat at a Mexican restaurant, it had all the TexMex fares we find in American Mex-taurants.

Diving: the entire group dived with Johan's. The dive shop probably had never handled a group of over 30 divers, and the whole op was in chaos despite the efforts and plans of Johan. Most of the dive sites are 15min from the resort, which uses speedboats (unlike the rest of Philippines that has the slower but more spacious bangkas). The water was warm, no currents, and visibility between 8-15m. With this viz, I had no chance of getting any wreck photos worth keeping. The dives we did were:
Day 1. (evening) Check out dive at The Barges.
Day 2. El Capitain, San Quinton, LCU (all wrecks)
Day 3. LST, New York, LCU (all wrecks)
Day 4. Ocean Adventure marine park, Japanese Patrol Boat, LST Reef .

With good visibility, several of these wrecks could be pretty nice, esp New York, LST and the Japanese Patrol boat. However, with various other attractive dive spots in Philippines, I doubt I'll go down to Subic again. Luckily, we had good company, and had a fair amount of fun. My colleague Daniel Palomar tried to get me going on free-diving (I made it to 7m, he did one to 20+m!).

Below the are thumbs of some of the better photos from the trip. They were taken by my Canon G11 camera in the Canon housing, and mostly with the help of my Inon 220Z strobe running on optical slave mode. click on the thumb to open the image in a new tab/page.



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