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Philippines

2026-07-09 → 07-20 · 31 photos

26 dives · 24h 55m underwater · max 31 m · 26–30 °C · EAN31–33

gear: Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II · Fantasea FG9X · INON S2000 · Weefine Smart Focus 5000 · Weefine WFL03 (Macro) · INON UWL-H100 (Wide-Angle) · Suunto EON Core

Twelve days at Scandi Divers on Big La Laguna Beach, Puerto Galera, diving the Verde Island Passage, one of the richest stretches of reef on the planet for marine life, and a macro paradise.

The timing worked out, just. We arrived on 9 July as Super Typhoon Bavi (Inday locally) was turning away from Luzon. It never made landfall, but it pushed the southwest monsoon over Mindoro, so the first days were grey, wet and choppy. Mid-trip, Tropical Storm Haishen (Josie) slipped into the Philippine area on 14 July and fizzled into a low within the day, with no storm signals raised. We flew home on the 20th, three days before Tropical Depression Kiyapo brought the next set of warnings to northern Luzon. So: one typhoon either side, and a storm that never really arrived in the middle.

Underwater, the passage delivered the small and strange: a pygmy seahorse on its sea fan, frogfish in three kinds, painted , warty and giant , one of them fishing with its lure out , a peacock mantis shrimp , a wunderpus and a cuttlefish . The one I’d hoped for and never expected was the purple Rhinopias : a scorpionfish that dresses as a drifting frond of weed, so rarely seen that plenty of keen divers go a lifetime without finding one, and one of the fish people travel the world to look for. Seeing one at all is luck; this one sat still long enough to photograph.