Moalboal

A week at Magic Island Dive Resort in Moalboal, on the southwest coast of Cebu, after five days up on Malapascua: the second half of two weeks in the Philippines. Seventeen dives, to 39 m.

The walls here are covered in soft corals and sea fans, and the sea fans held two pygmy seahorses. The critter list was long: an ornate ghost pipefish hanging by a feather star, giant and warty frogfish, a leaf scorpionfish, an octopus, a white-eyed moray, tomato clownfish and banded coral shrimp, and best of all a blue-ringed octopus out in the open. Green turtles turned up more than once, and on one evening dive the mandarinfish came out at dusk.

One morning we crossed to Oslob, on Cebu’s southeast coast, to snorkel with the whale sharks, which are fed there by the local boatmen. It was an incredible thing to be in the water with, but I didn’t think much then about what feeding them every day does to their migration and behaviour. I wouldn’t go again, and I’d now look for places where you see them wild, like Donsol or South Ari in the Maldives.

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.