Malapascua

Five days on Malapascua, a small island off the northern tip of Cebu, staying at Tepanee Beach Resort. It’s the place to see thresher sharks: three times we were on the boat before dawn for Monad Shoal, where they come up from the deep to be cleaned. On the third morning the camera finally caught them, circling the shoal in the first light with those impossibly long tails. The first half of two weeks in the Philippines, before heading south to Moalboal.

Between the dawn starts, the reefs around the island were full of small things: a snowflake moray, cuttlefish on the sand, a porcelain crab in its anemone, a pygmy seahorse lost in a yellow sea fan, a yellow seahorse, a bubble coral shrimp and a porcupinefish under a ledge.

Shot on a Canon G9 X Mark II in its Fantasea housing, with an INON S200 and a Sea Dragon 2000. The camera’s clock was still on Egypt time from the year before, so the photo times have been corrected to fit the dive log.