I'm going to put all these together in this part, because with the exception of the House Reef, I dove these places only once.
Remember I was only in Moalboal from Sunday afternoon to Thursday morning. A night dive on the first day and then three dive days. I was only able to cram in 14 dives :-( I really would have like to have stayed for at least another four or five days. I think if you're doing 4-5 dives a day, then in about 7-10 days you should be able to pretty thorougly cover Moalboal.
On Monday the 5th after finishing up our dive at Pescador Island we then headed over to Kasai Wall. After tying up to the mooring buoy. We took a break. It probably didn't take more than 30 minutes to get there and we wanted to have at least an hour surface interval. My morning dive had ended at 10:37.... at 11:39 I was starting my next dive :-)
Kasai is a drift dive. There can be a little current running at times. We just went with it. Water temp as usual was 85F... Visibility was 70-80 feet. My maximum depth on this dive was 77 feet with an average depth of 39 feet. Total dive time was 55 minutes.
Saw a nice lionfish almost immediately... that was the one I dropped down to 77 feet to grab a shot of. Then a grouper (least I think it's a grouper, I can't find it in my books). Nice variety of angelfish, damselfish. A Pink Anemonefish and the usual assortment of butterflyfish and anthias. A turtle swimming in the distance. A nice dive. Fifty-five minutes flew by and the dive was over before I knew it.
The boat picked us up and we headed back for lunch. After lunch we went to Talisay Point. Again almost immediately into the dive I spied a nice-size lionfish. I saw an interesting looking Toby, which was not in my fish identification books... sometimes I wonder if I were actually looking at a new species that hadn't been officially identified. Probably not :-) Then I got another shot of another Spotfin Lionfish which was almost as common as the "Common Lionfish" ;-) Then a Puffer which again was not in my fish identification books. Saw two turtles... one swam off as soon as he saw us the other just kept calmly munching away on sponges :-)
A night dive that night and then the west side of Pescador Island the next morning on the 6th. After Pescador we went to Tubla Point. Stonefish... a nice nudibranch, two species of anemonefish within three feet of each other, sea turtle swimming by, a group of barracuda in a line swimming by and of course... lionfish ;-) Visibility was down a little, but still over 50 feet. My maximum depth was 71 feet, average of 41 feet. Dive time was 53 minutes.
After a break for lunch we headed to Sampaguita. The cool thing here were the schools of razorfish, lots of baitfish, two turtles and several batfish were the highlights of this dive. This was again a drift dive, we coasted along with a slight current and were picked up by the boat at the end of the dive. This was the pattern of pretty much all the diving here except the beach dives we made at night. My maximum depth on this dive was 60 feet with an average of 37 feet... Bottom time was 45 minutes.
After a short surface interval we made another dive on the House Reef. It was starting to get into the late afternoon now and there were huge schools of baitfish (sardines). In some cases they would literally block out the surface there were so many! There were also schools of trevally. We spotted several Banded Pipefish and also a Sea Moth.
Another night dive rounded out the day.
On the 7th which was my last dive day for this trip we were in the water shortly after 8AM making a dive off the beach on the House Reef. Again we were seeing huge schools of sardines and trevally. Also big tunas making runs in and out of the sardines! Awesome! Also spotted some nice nudibranchs :-)
After that we were on the boat out to Pescador Island. I had expressed the desire to photograph frogfish and we found three within a short period of time.
After Pescador we headed over to Dolphin House. Visibility was over 40-50 feet. Lots of lionfish. A nudibranch, and a very tiny juvenile scorpionfish that was maybe only 2-3 inches long. Very cool! :-)
We had a break for lunch and then we headed over to White House Reef so called because... you guessed it! There is a White House there on the shore :-) This was probably my best dive for turtles. We saw three different turtles and I got some really nice shots :-)
I skipped the night dive and decided to just relax the last night I was in Moalboal. The next morning I settled up with the dive shop for my dives, packed my things and my driver showed up to take me back to Cebu. I checked into my hotel, took a shower, watched a movie. Then walked down to a nearby internet cafe and checked my email. Then went and had some dinner and came back to my room and took a nap until I got up to be at the airport at 4:30 AM.
I had a layover in Manila. I went out for breakfast and then visited the Mall of Asia before heading back to the airport to catch my afternoon flight to Tokyo and home to Japan. I began planning my next trip almost immediately.
The glitch that prevented me from uploading photos when I originally posted this report seems to be fixed now... so a few photos from Cebu and Moalboal
For those who are interested, my camera is a Canon A630. This is basically a little $200, 8.0 megapixel, digital, point and shoot.
When I started diving again last year I looked into different systems. I decided that I couldn't afford what I really wanted yet, so I bought an Ikelite housing for the camera that I already had.
I considered a Canon housing, but decided to go with the Ikelite because I liked the extra safety margin that a housing that is good to 200 feet (when I'm never probably going to go that deep) gave me.
Additionally, I purchased an Ikelite DS125 Substrobe with a manual controller. This strobe I will be able to utilize with the system that I will eventually have.
I had a lot of experience in photography, but had never done any underwater photography before August of 2007. Digital is nice because you get instant feedback on your mistakes and trust me I've made plenty
My digital zoom is turned off. I normally have the camera set on manual and will manually white balance as I go. Sometimes I use the strobe and sometimes I don't.
I do have some software programs that allow me to make corrections once I've downloaded the originals onto my computer. I make a copy and then make all my corrections to it, keeping the original untouched. I liken this to when I used to do custom color printing. I'm taking the original image and making it as good as it can possibly be.
I'm planning on eventually moving to a Nikon D300. Before that I will probably purchase a second DS125 as I can incorporate that into my current setup. It's a lot of money, so its easier to break it up a little and work on my system a piece at a time .
Hope everyone enjoys the photos as much as I enjoyed making them
I forgot to mention that I also use Inon closeup and wide angle lenses. They're a standard 67mm thread and attach to the front port of my Ikelite housing
Moalboal Part 4-Conclusion
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