Day 4 took us diving some of the dive sites around the bay. The first site was the beautiful Canyons, a world class exhilarating drift dive. This is "the dive" to do in Puerto Galera if you are an experienced diver with a taste for the fast and furious. Drop in close to “Hole In The Wall” and let the current take you deeper along the slope until you reach an area where currents and mother nature has formed three spectacular canyons in the reef.
After a surface interval back at the resort with some refreshments we headed out for our second dive at “Dungon Wall”. This is where we did our check dive at the beginning of the trip and it was so good that everyone wanted to go back searching for the pygmy seahorses and guess what we saw them again but unfortunately my camera did not do justice.
“La Laguna Point” was our third dive of the day, a small wall with a very healthy reef starting at 5 and dropping down to 15 metres where a lush coral slope takes over down to about 20 metres. The wall has cracks and crevices with an amazing variety of marine life ranging from anemone fish to scorpionfish, schools of longfin bannerfish, sweetlips, cardinal fish, trigger fish and hiding lionfish.
In the evening before dusk we headed out to “Small La Laguna” for the Mandarin dive. I am not very keen on night dives for various reasons but tried to go and experienced this amazing dive. All divers in our group got a glimpse of the mandarin fish that come out to mate and then continued to explore the small reef.
Day 5 offered more of the same! Sleep, eat and dive the full day, a dream for any diver. Our dives took place at “Kilima Bay”, “Balaytigue” and “Giant Clams”. All the dive sites we visited were impressive, but I really liked the Giant Clams, a great place for muck diving! The site starts shallow at 6 metres where we found the Giant Clams, some up to 1.5 metres wide, calmly filter-feeding the nutrient rich waters. We then swam deeper and ended up in the muck, a sandy grassy bottom where we looked for different species of Nudibranch, Seahorses, Cuttlefish and more. If you are lucky on a night dive you could see the Mimics and Wonderpus come out to hunt!
