First impressions of the hotel:
I'm in a "poolside room" on ground level. I'm glad to reduce stairs (the restaurant is on the third level...). The room is fine. No dresser or bureau, therefore, not as much shelf space as I'd like to put all my swimsuits & rash guards... Sufficient electrical outlets for me, including close to the bed.
I've now had one dinner, one breakfast, and one lunch at Scandi. I have the full board plan. There is a limited menu for each of those meals. Vegetarian options are offered. No complaints on the food so far. They gave me a personalized reuseable insulated bottle, and there are hot-and-cold drinking water dispensers located in various places of the hotel, so my issues about how to brush my teeth are resolved.
First two dives:
The boats are bangkas--outrigger boats. You back-roll in; they hand the camera to you (if you have a camera) after you roll in. The first two dives were drift-ish dives. First dive with Sinandigan wall. A gently sloping wall, my max depth was about 70 ft. Visibility was great (100 ft? 150 ft? Not gin-clear, but still quite clear), water was 86 F (with maybe a 2-3 F cooler thermocline), gentle current, we just flowed with the current. The nudibranchs are gigantic! I was looking for macro nudibranchs (where you need a magnifying glass or microscope). These look like the size of someone's thumb! Lots of crinoids hanging on to the coral or the rubble. Many moray-type eels. One octopus hanging out near a crevice, but not in the crevice. A large sea turtle munching on a sponge (I think). When you get to your low air point, the dive master goes to the safety stop depth and puts up a deployable sausage. After you surface, the boat comes to pick you up. I wasn't briefed on the pick up procedure: You let the boat get to you, and you swim to make sure you're between the outrigger and the hull. You grab a rope strung to the hull. You can choose to remove your BC and they haul it up, or keep it on. Remove fins, climb up a ladder. You get fresh hot facecloths to clean yourself a bit. You motor back to the resort for your surface interval.
You use your reusable bottle for liquids during the interval. They passed around muffins from the kitchen as a snack.
Between dive 1 and dive 2, I arranged to borrow the dive shop manager's cell phone housing, so I'll post photos from dive 2 in my next post. Dive 2 was Sabang Point. Again, a gently sloping wall. It took me a while to sort out how to use the cell phone in the housing, but I managed to figure it out without drowning myself or flooding the housing. More nudibranchs, a few mantis shrimp, etc. If the travel weren't so painful, I could see myself diving here much more frequently. Temperature was noticeably cooler--82-84 F (the wrist computer was saying 84 F, but it felt a bit cooler than that).
My dive package is a total of 25 dives over 10 days w/ unlimited nitrox, extra dives are "by the dive", but there's a not-so-explicit "fourth dive and/or night dives are not incluced in the package and are extra."
