pakman
Contributor
OK,
Now that I am well medicated (caught a nasty flu from some snotty expat kids coughing all over me on my flight back from Manila) and have cleared off most of the office emails, I thought I'd write a more formal trip report.
As some of you know, Caloy had organized this trip well in advance last year and we all anxiously counted down the days. Sogod Bay is one of the few places where they allow you to dive with the whale sharks. Donsol, also known for whalesharks, is a sanctuary and only snorkeling is allowed. Sogod Bay is on the Sothern tip of Leyte Island. Leyte is northwest of Cebu in the Visaya Region. The island also has a bit of history as the place where General McAuthur returned to Philippine soil. The island was also the site of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval millitary battles in history.
There are two main dive ops in the Sogod area that I know of. There's Peter's Dive Resort that's been operating there since 2000. We ended up booking with Sogod Bay Scuba Resort a newer resort which had just opened in 2006. They are right next to each other just slightly north of the town of Padre Burgos on the west side of Sogod Bay. In fact, one of the co-owners of Sogod, Ron, is a former partner from Peter's. The facilities are basic but nice. I didn't get to check out the rooms since Larry, aka purplehammerhead, stole my room and I had to stay in one of the rooms outside of the resort (conveniently located next to the compressor). Such a great feeling waking up to a compressor at 5am...
First off, getting there...
By air, land, and sea, our group descended on Sogod Bay... The smart one's flew in from Manila to the capital of Leyte Tacloban. Cebu Pacific had some pretty good promotional rates. PAL also flies into Tacloban. But this involves a 3+ hr car ride to the resort.
Since I was arriving a day early and didn't want to pay for an entire van by myself from the airport, I chose to fly into Cebu and take the ferry. Bad move. I arrived on Christmas day and was planning on taking the 9am ferry to Hilongos on the 26th as Hilongos is just an 1hr15min drive from the resort. Even though I arrived early that morning, the Cebu ferry pier was a zoo with many trying to get back to the provinces after Christmas. By the time I got to the Oceanjet counter, the tickets were all sold out. There is another fast ferry (Kingswell) (from Pier 3) that leaves at 5pm but for some reason it was not running or full. The only other option was a 9pm slow boat that would get me in 2-3am. I decided to stay in Cebu City an xtra nite and take the next morning ferry out with Tim, his gf, and Matthew who was flying in from Manila.
The return trip on the 30th was also a nightmare. We were hit by a pretty severe low pressure that disrupted transportation. Matthew got lucky and took a 9am Kingswell ferry from Bato back to Cebu. It appears that the Coast Guard issued weather warnings around 10am and all the ferries cancelled the remaining boats back in Cebu for the day. There was confusion on which ferries were actually running. The driver thought the Supercat from Ormoc was still running, so I made a dash for it only to find that their ferries were all cancelled and sitting in Cebu... As I needed to get back to Manila the following day, I decided to head up to Tacloban and try to get on the pm flight back to Manila. In the end, I had a nice 5hr car tour of Southern Leyte that put a $100 dent in my wallet. Plus another $100 for the last minute flight back to Manila... grrrr... So the lesson is, if you've got int'l connecting flights you cannot afford to miss, you might be better off flying into/ out of Tacloban. If you have a more flexible schedule, going via ferry from Cebu is possibly cheaper. Oh and I think the folks driving directly to Tacloban from the resort faced a landslide that closed one of the major roads...
Now back to the resort and diving...
Pic of the main building of Sogod Bay Scuba Resort...
Dive site map of Sogod Bay ("SBSR" is the resort)
Sogod Bay Scuba Resort (SBSR) has one large bangka. Could probably fit 10-12 divers. The whale sharks are on the other side of the bay at a site called Sunok, #22 on the map on Panaon Island. It takes about an hour to get there.
Since we got in late, we didn't do any whale shark dives the first day. We did one dive near the resort and then a night "muck" dive from the town pier in Padre Burgos. Some pretty nasty water, but there were some interesting critters to be found. Found it amusing on exiting from the dive to find myself right in front of a seedy looking KTV bar with a few local gals beckoning... Unfortunately, the rest of the group wouldn't let me investigate this bar...
OK, back to the whale sharks. My memory is a bit fluffy, but I think the plan was to start off at 7am. The restaurant took orders from us the previous night for packaged breakfast and lunch sandwiches. To be honest, the sandwiches were a bit lacking. Or the cook thought I needed to go on a diet. Everyone else seemed to have large sandwiches while mine seemed to have shrunk. Softdrinks, snacks, coffe, tea,and water were provided on board.
Sunok, the promise land! unfortunately, that was the only sunshine we saw that day...
Anyways, so we get over to Sunok, stop by a nearby town to hire some local spotters. They would paddle around with one guy dipping his head underwater to find the whale sharks. Once they would find one, they would start shouting and point their paddle in the general direction the whale shark was moving. Our bangka would then try to drop us in in front of the whale shark. It's a bit of hit or miss and there were a number of false alarms. We had about 8 divers in our group, 3 with large DSLR setups. It was quite amusing getting everyone back onboard. Finally we hit jackpot. Unfortunately, some of us got dropped in the wrong place. I got extremely lucky to find a whale shark heading right at me as I descended. With just barely enough time to get my strobes and camera setup and snap off a couple shots, the next thing I know the whale shark is nearly on top of me. I swam over the top to the otherside to get another shot of it with some divers in the background. Sadly, somewhere in the chaos, the whale shark was spooked by one of our divers, and swam swiftly away without any chance of us keeping up... Total bottom time was probably just a few minutes.
The first whale shark!
Luckily we got another chance with a smaller whale shark. This one was more cooperative and allow us to swim along side for a little longer.
After lunch, we decided to do a regular dive on the sanctuary at the northern part of Sunok. The area has a very healthy reef with abundant critters. We even had two whale shark encounters (one we could just make out in the distance and another that swam over us but was too shallow and us too deep for us to ascend quickly enough).
Overall, a great day of diving. I think we all had some pretty big grins on our faces. Although I was wishing we would have had more time with the whale sharks. I think I only had a chance to take 6-8 frames in total of the whale sharks (half of which were rubbish as I didn't set one of my strobes correctly).
[To be continued]
Now that I am well medicated (caught a nasty flu from some snotty expat kids coughing all over me on my flight back from Manila) and have cleared off most of the office emails, I thought I'd write a more formal trip report.
As some of you know, Caloy had organized this trip well in advance last year and we all anxiously counted down the days. Sogod Bay is one of the few places where they allow you to dive with the whale sharks. Donsol, also known for whalesharks, is a sanctuary and only snorkeling is allowed. Sogod Bay is on the Sothern tip of Leyte Island. Leyte is northwest of Cebu in the Visaya Region. The island also has a bit of history as the place where General McAuthur returned to Philippine soil. The island was also the site of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval millitary battles in history.
There are two main dive ops in the Sogod area that I know of. There's Peter's Dive Resort that's been operating there since 2000. We ended up booking with Sogod Bay Scuba Resort a newer resort which had just opened in 2006. They are right next to each other just slightly north of the town of Padre Burgos on the west side of Sogod Bay. In fact, one of the co-owners of Sogod, Ron, is a former partner from Peter's. The facilities are basic but nice. I didn't get to check out the rooms since Larry, aka purplehammerhead, stole my room and I had to stay in one of the rooms outside of the resort (conveniently located next to the compressor). Such a great feeling waking up to a compressor at 5am...
First off, getting there...
By air, land, and sea, our group descended on Sogod Bay... The smart one's flew in from Manila to the capital of Leyte Tacloban. Cebu Pacific had some pretty good promotional rates. PAL also flies into Tacloban. But this involves a 3+ hr car ride to the resort.
Since I was arriving a day early and didn't want to pay for an entire van by myself from the airport, I chose to fly into Cebu and take the ferry. Bad move. I arrived on Christmas day and was planning on taking the 9am ferry to Hilongos on the 26th as Hilongos is just an 1hr15min drive from the resort. Even though I arrived early that morning, the Cebu ferry pier was a zoo with many trying to get back to the provinces after Christmas. By the time I got to the Oceanjet counter, the tickets were all sold out. There is another fast ferry (Kingswell) (from Pier 3) that leaves at 5pm but for some reason it was not running or full. The only other option was a 9pm slow boat that would get me in 2-3am. I decided to stay in Cebu City an xtra nite and take the next morning ferry out with Tim, his gf, and Matthew who was flying in from Manila.
The return trip on the 30th was also a nightmare. We were hit by a pretty severe low pressure that disrupted transportation. Matthew got lucky and took a 9am Kingswell ferry from Bato back to Cebu. It appears that the Coast Guard issued weather warnings around 10am and all the ferries cancelled the remaining boats back in Cebu for the day. There was confusion on which ferries were actually running. The driver thought the Supercat from Ormoc was still running, so I made a dash for it only to find that their ferries were all cancelled and sitting in Cebu... As I needed to get back to Manila the following day, I decided to head up to Tacloban and try to get on the pm flight back to Manila. In the end, I had a nice 5hr car tour of Southern Leyte that put a $100 dent in my wallet. Plus another $100 for the last minute flight back to Manila... grrrr... So the lesson is, if you've got int'l connecting flights you cannot afford to miss, you might be better off flying into/ out of Tacloban. If you have a more flexible schedule, going via ferry from Cebu is possibly cheaper. Oh and I think the folks driving directly to Tacloban from the resort faced a landslide that closed one of the major roads...
Now back to the resort and diving...
Pic of the main building of Sogod Bay Scuba Resort...
Dive site map of Sogod Bay ("SBSR" is the resort)
Sogod Bay Scuba Resort (SBSR) has one large bangka. Could probably fit 10-12 divers. The whale sharks are on the other side of the bay at a site called Sunok, #22 on the map on Panaon Island. It takes about an hour to get there.
Since we got in late, we didn't do any whale shark dives the first day. We did one dive near the resort and then a night "muck" dive from the town pier in Padre Burgos. Some pretty nasty water, but there were some interesting critters to be found. Found it amusing on exiting from the dive to find myself right in front of a seedy looking KTV bar with a few local gals beckoning... Unfortunately, the rest of the group wouldn't let me investigate this bar...
OK, back to the whale sharks. My memory is a bit fluffy, but I think the plan was to start off at 7am. The restaurant took orders from us the previous night for packaged breakfast and lunch sandwiches. To be honest, the sandwiches were a bit lacking. Or the cook thought I needed to go on a diet. Everyone else seemed to have large sandwiches while mine seemed to have shrunk. Softdrinks, snacks, coffe, tea,and water were provided on board.
Sunok, the promise land! unfortunately, that was the only sunshine we saw that day...
Anyways, so we get over to Sunok, stop by a nearby town to hire some local spotters. They would paddle around with one guy dipping his head underwater to find the whale sharks. Once they would find one, they would start shouting and point their paddle in the general direction the whale shark was moving. Our bangka would then try to drop us in in front of the whale shark. It's a bit of hit or miss and there were a number of false alarms. We had about 8 divers in our group, 3 with large DSLR setups. It was quite amusing getting everyone back onboard. Finally we hit jackpot. Unfortunately, some of us got dropped in the wrong place. I got extremely lucky to find a whale shark heading right at me as I descended. With just barely enough time to get my strobes and camera setup and snap off a couple shots, the next thing I know the whale shark is nearly on top of me. I swam over the top to the otherside to get another shot of it with some divers in the background. Sadly, somewhere in the chaos, the whale shark was spooked by one of our divers, and swam swiftly away without any chance of us keeping up... Total bottom time was probably just a few minutes.
The first whale shark!
Luckily we got another chance with a smaller whale shark. This one was more cooperative and allow us to swim along side for a little longer.
After lunch, we decided to do a regular dive on the sanctuary at the northern part of Sunok. The area has a very healthy reef with abundant critters. We even had two whale shark encounters (one we could just make out in the distance and another that swam over us but was too shallow and us too deep for us to ascend quickly enough).
Overall, a great day of diving. I think we all had some pretty big grins on our faces. Although I was wishing we would have had more time with the whale sharks. I think I only had a chance to take 6-8 frames in total of the whale sharks (half of which were rubbish as I didn't set one of my strobes correctly).
[To be continued]
