Whale Shark with baby - Video on YouTube

Click here for nice video from a whale shark encounter just on our house reef from Patrick Devine. What makes this video special is that you can see a tiny whale shark baby beneath the big one at the end of the video. The picture is from Yoris, a dive instructor who spend a lot of time in Moalboal and is now in the Maldives, I think.

The other day Jesper (owner of Neptune Dive Center), Lars (one of the owners of the Chili Bar) and some other divers had an encounter with 4 whale sharks in Sunken Island. This is unheard of and supports our impression that we have more whale sharks, and turtles, than before.

Of course they celebrated in Chili for the rest of the day.

Moalboal community - what's up with Patrick?

Many of you know Patrick Devine, an airline Captain who is PADI instructor and IANTD Trimix Technical Diver, and Stella, his beautiful wife. Both of them are living several month of the year in Moalboal.

Patrick, who always looks for something extraordinary, married his Stella at his motorbike dealer at a biker wedding in Florida. Check http://www.polarisindustries.com/en-us/VRA/Insider/BlogWedding.htm for more details.

Patrick contributed some also awesome whale shark videos and shark pics he shot just on our house reef. These videos and picture galleries can be viewed on our upcoming new website, maybe sometime in May or June.

Dive Safari Moalboal, Sumilon Island, Apo Island, Balicasag island, Cabilao Island

I just came back from a 5-day dive safari. The weather was perfect and we had only experienced divers on board, which allowed me to do some relaxed dives on my own. My dive buddy for the first 2 days was Werner, a German CMAS diver who is very experienced. We did a couple of very nice dives in Sumilon (frog fish, nudibranches, blacktip sharks) and Apo Island (schooling jacks, giant bumphead parrot fish). Apo, as usual, had some very strong currents at Coconut Point. This is by far the best dive spot in Apo, but you can’t dive there often because it usually has high waves and strong currents. The next couple of days I dove with Elvis and his group of Honk Komg Divers, all very experienced. They belong to a dive club in Hong Kong and are used to dive in difficult environments, such as limited visibility and strong currents. Again, this made my job easy and I could relax and enjoy the upcoming dives. We had excellent dives in Balicasag (schools of jack fish on 2 dives, large school of big barracudas on 1 dive) and Cabilao. Especially the dive spot called Light House in Cabilao offered us some fantastic dives, schooling barracudas in strong currents, napoleon fish and much more. Even our last dive in Mactan Island proved to be impressive, thousands of sardines surrounded us, and again a huge barracuda, about 2m in size. All in all a very nice safari with lots of exceptionally good dives. Lucky Tommi is embarking today on the next safari…