Hi,
I haven't stayed at any of the 3 resorts that you'd mentioned but have been to all 3 places.
For Manado, bunakan has nice coral reef with relatively no/ slow current. Lembih is an excellent muck diving site. It is about an hour or 2 away from bunakan (by car). You can spot the flamboyant cuttlefish, frog fish, wasp fish, leaf fish, lots of seahorse, bangai cardinalfish, nudibranches, etc etc. In short, lots of funny looking critters.
Maldives was great but I had gone there before the tsunami (not sure what's the impact) and on a liveaboard. Many dive sites have strange currents; I have experienced dives where my buddy and I were swept in different directions in the same dive. Maldives is nice in that it is rather diversified where you can spot the bigger creatures as well as the macros. There were nudibranches, scorpionfish, eels, whale sharks, manta rays, etc.
For Puerta Galera, unfortunately I had gone there on the off-season (April) and did not find it to be as interesting. We saw the usual creatures (jacks, surgeon, squirrel, grouper, eels, etc) in SE Asia. Not much current underwater but surface current was quite fast so recommended to do negative entry.
The pictures that I had taken on those trips are posted in my gallery, if you want to have an idea of what we saw there.
Hope this helps,
Cat.
