ABOUT TUBBATAHA
Tubbataha Reefs is a marine park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the middle of the Sulu Sea, about 150 - 180km southeast of Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines. It's protected by park rangers (mostly from the Philippines Navy) who do a pretty good job with their limited resources of trying to enforce a no-take policy in an approximately 1000 square km zone around the two atolls. Seasonal weather and rough seas limit the diving to a short period lasting from the end of March until June.
Because it's so far from dry land, it's only accessible via liveaboard.
THE QUALITY OF DIVING
I dived there May 22-26, and the diving was very good. Not quite as good as I had hoped, but very good.
I had a great time, and overall I was very happy with the quality of the diving. We did 4 daytime dives each day and usually had optional night dives (an option which most of us usually declined). Some of the dives especially the late afternoon dives, when the fishes weren't very active and the light was dimming were somewhat disappointing, but most of the dives were very good, with excellent marine life.
Night dives weren't so great.
I've dived in a number of places around the Americas and Caribbean, but my previous experience in the Indian/western Pacific Oceans region is rather limited, so I can't compare Tubbataha to the more famous Indo-Pacific diving destinations . . . but one of the other divers on the boat opined that Tubbataha is overall better than both Sipadan and Komodo where he's dived in the past. He did concede that his cabinmate thought that Sipadan's better, and he agreed that both Sipadan and Komodo offer some attractions lacking at Tubbataha (e.g., a good chance of seeing mantas, good macro life, etc.).
THE EASE/DIFFICULTY OF DIVING
There were a couple of inexperienced divers among us (fewer than 10 dives at the start of the cruise) and one or two others without much more experience, and they did fine on our trip mostly because the divemasters worked closely with them, and because the currents usually weren't very strong. I'd gone there expecting a lot of wild drift dives, but only a few of our dives were really fast rides, and on many of them there was little current. Often, though, the currents are strong and some divers find them to be difficult.
I wish we'd had a few more fast drift dives in strong currents because those tend to attract a lot of marine life.
Because the nearest tide tables are for Puerto Princesa, which is almost 200 km away, the DMs and boat captain can't predict currents very well based upon tide tables so they have to look out into the sea to observe the water movement and plan the dives according to what they see. There were a few drift dives in strong currents, which inexperienced divers might not handle very well.
Almost all of us dived EAN32 for the whole trip. With 4 or 5 dives a day, those few divers not certified for nitrox were more limited in their depths and bottom times, and were more fatigued than the rest of us after a day of diving.
SHARKS, TURTLES, AND RAYS
One really great thing about Tubbataha is the abundance of reef sharks. I love diving with sharks of all sizes and all species from little bamboo sharks and horn sharks to big toothy sand tiger sharks and bull sharks, etc. but I've never before seen so many sharks dive after dive, day after day. I saw well over 100 individual sharks, sometimes by themselves but often in pairs or groups of 3 or 4 to more than a dozen.
Most were whitetip reef sharks, but there were also a number of gray reef sharks and a few blacktip reef sharks as well. Sometimes there were as many as 15 or more reef sharks within my field of view, and of course I didn't see the ones behind me or beyond the range of visibility.
In addition to the toothy ones we saw one nurse shark, and about half the divers on our liveaboard saw one juvenile whale shark the first whale shark ever seen by most of those divers.
Some of us did one dive on air (all the other dives were on EAN32 for most of us) to go deep and look for hammerheads, but we didn't see any. About a 1 in 3 chance at that site, we were told. Still, on that deep dive I saw a lot of big adult gray reef sharks (shallower on the reef, juvenile grays tend to be more common than adults), a great barracuda, some giant trevallies, etc.
I saw turtles usually green; a hawksbill or two on 1 dive out of about 3 or 4. Sometimes it was just one in the distance, and sometimes there were 2 or 3 or more turtles which stayed close to us for a while.
There were some Kuhl's blue-spotted rays and bigger reef rays on occasion, but not a lot as it's mostly vertical or sloping walls from about 12 or 15 meters down to where the reef meets the sand at about 60m or whatever. Mantas visit Tubbataha but we didn't see any. A couple of devil rays and an eagle ray were welcome sights, although I personally only saw one of the devil rays.
REEF FISHES
Reef fishes of all sizes were numerous, and Tubbataha definitely has the greatest diversity of reef fish species I've ever seen. The shallower parts of the reef were swarmed with a good variety of anthias, damsels, surgeonfishes, triggerfishes, wrasses, parrotfishes, etc. My logbook entries reflect thousands of redtooth triggers, hundreds of pyramid butterflyfish, hundreds of humpback snappers, countless misc. unicornfishes and other tangs etc.
I saw a few bumphead parrotfish, a Napoleon wrasse, and tons of many-spotted sweetlips and a lot of diagonal-banded sweetlips plus a number of others. Really big groupers were rare but there were a few, and lots of smaller ones.
Redtooths were the most common triggerfishes (sometimes hundreds to thousands, sometimes in huge aggregations with countless other fishes filter-feeding in the currents), but orange-lined and clown and yellowmargin and titan triggerfishes and others were also fairly common.
Tangs/unicornfishes/surgeonfishes were so numerous and so diverse that I stopped bothering to ID them.
Star, map, white-spotted, blue-spotted, and black-spotted puffers were fairly common. Toward the top of the wall and in the shallows there was also a great diversity of anthias, damsels, surgeonfishes, parrotfishes, triggers, etc.
The sheer number and diversity of reef fishes, especially at shallower depths, were a big part of why one of the divers on our trip said that Tubbataha was overall better than Sipadan and Komodo even though the macro stuff wasn't so great.
Because the fishes were so numerous and so diverse, I can't even begin to account for the great majority of them; I've just noted here a few which I could easily ID.
PELAGIC FISHES
Quite good, although not always in the quantities I would have liked to have seen.
Giant trevallies passed by on about 1 of 3 dives, and we saw ranging from a few individuals to enormous schools of many bluefin trevallies and bigeye trevallies, plus a few black jacks and some rainbow runners and other miscellaneous jacks. Some of the schools of jacks were so big that they obscured the view of everything else, but that was a rather uncommon occurrence. Bluefins and giants and bigeyes seemed to be the most common of the jacks/trevallies.
I only saw 4 or 5 great barracudas, but there were a few schools of pickhandle barracudas and one big school of bigeye barracudas.
I saw tunas on 4 or 5 dives sometimes only one, sometimes with a school of others. I positively ID'd some as dogtooth tunas, but I'm not sure about all of them.
I guess fusiliers and snappers are pelagics, not reef fishes. Schools of bluestreak, blue-and-yellow, lunar, and other fusiliers were present in populations ranging from dozens to thousands sometimes so many fusiliers I couldn't see much of anything else. I hadn't seen a lot of humpback snappers before, so I noticed that they were often present in sizeable schools, and there were also lots of more common/more widely-distributed snappers such as checkered, red, two-spot, five-lined, etc. On the drift dives when the current was really moving, the smaller pelagic fishes joined together with some of the reef fishes to form large aggregations in which it was hard to tell one species from another as they were all swarming around to try to find the best places for plankton-feeding and for evading the predator fishes.
I was a bit disappointed that we didn't have more of those fast drift dives surrounded by thousands of fishes, but overall I was happy to see so many pelagics.
CORALS, SPONGES, ETC.
On the walls, the hard and soft corals were healthy and abundant and the most diverse I've ever seen. At the top of the reef, though, there was a lot of damage from past dynamite fishing. Tubbataha has been somewhat protected from dynamite fishing for about 15 or 20 years, but in shallow waters the legacy of past destructive fishing practices is sadly still very evident. For example, on top of the wall at about 12m 5m, Staghorn Point has a big beautiful area of staghorn and several other types of Acropora sp. corals, but there are occasional craters of dead reef within that area which were obviously caused by past dynamite fishing. Sad to see. But as I said, on the vertical walls the hard and soft corals were fantastic.
Tubbataha had the best and the biggest gorgonians I've ever seen. Most walls had many beautiful small purple gorgonians, and there were also larger sea fans of 2m to >3m diameter bigger than the divers passing by.
Also often bigger than divers, the barrel sponges were the largest I'd ever seen. Some of them were 3m or larger in diameter: truly enormous sponges. The smaller sponges on the walls were also very healthy and very diverse; many species I'd never seen before.
Tunicates were mostly Didemnum molle (colonial) and a lot of beautiful blue ascidians of Rhopalaea sp. or maybe Clavelina sp. (individual); I'm not sure of genus or species. Loads of them, though, whatever they were.
I was disappointed that other invertebrates such as stars and crustaceans and nudibranchs and flatworms etc. were not very abundant, and I didn't see any cephalopods at all.
THE BOAT
I was on the Stella Maris Explorer, owned and operated by Expedition Fleet. Overall I was happy enough with it, although I have only done a few liveaboards before so I don't have much basis for comparison. It wasn't an extremely luxurious boat, but it also wasn't anywhere as expensive as the luxury boats from the Aggressor Fleet or Peter Hughes or whatever.
Our cabin was one of the less expensive ones (on C-deck which was on the lower level) and it was a bit small, but adequate. Other than sleeping, few reasons brought the divers into our cabins for very long; usually we spent our surface intervals, evenings, etc. out on the top decks or in the saloon.
Dive briefings and meals were in the saloon. I enjoyed the meals but vegetarians weren't satisfied even after advising Expedition Fleet beforehand of their dietary preferences. Coffee and tea and water were complimentary but we had to pay for other drinks; San Miguel Pilsen and Light beers were available but there were no wine or spirits for sale.
Unlimited nitrox (EAN32 from a membrane system) cost an extra US$100, or could be purchased by the individual fill.
The crew were mostly great generally very friendly and helpful. In fact, a little too helpful sometimes: I don't like it when other people mess with my kit, but I understand than on many liveaboards it's common for the crew to change cylinders etc. for divers between dives. In the interest of expediency on a tight schedule I let them do some of that, but in doing so they lost the right hip D-ring from my new harness, which didn't make me happy . . . I was teaching a nitrox course and I insisted upon me and my student doing our own O2 content analyses and labeling our bottles which other divers didn't and some of the crew really had a hard time understanding why I was being such a nuisance about doing our own O2 analyses and labels. Once I got my point across, though, they were OK with it and were perfectly accommodating.
There were 15 divers on our trip. Diving was done from 2 skiffs/chase boats with a back-roll entry and a ladder exit after removing kit and passing it up after the dives. Each chase boat had one divemaster/guide. I would have preferred a better DM-to-client ratio (1 to 4, rather than 1 to 8), but 2 more DMs would have made for rather crowded chase boats, and anyway I doubt they had the crew cabin capacity for that.
SUMMATION
Nobody went home unhappy after the trip. The diving was very good, even if it was not quite as mind-blowing as I had hoped it would be.
I'm a shark-lover, so I was really happy to see reef sharks on 4 out of 5 dives sometimes there were 15 or 20 sharks in my field of vision. And although I've seen bigger schools of each of them elsewhere, I was also happy to see so many big silvery pelagics such as jacks and tunas and barracudas.
Better than Sipadan, Komodo, etc.? I can't say because I haven't been to those places yet. One diver says Tubbataha's better than both; another says Tubbataha's not as good. Having seen or not seen the whale shark, devil rays, hawksbill turtles, etc., might have influenced their opinions of how good Tubbataha was.
But rather than comparing Tubbataha to the Maldives or the Red Sea or the Similans or Belize or wherever we've dived in the past, most of the more widely-traveled divers just enjoyed Tubbataha as a new and unique destination with great diving a little bit different from anywhere else we had been in the past. And from that perspective, it was great!
Tubbataha Reefs is a marine park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the middle of the Sulu Sea, about 150 - 180km southeast of Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines. It's protected by park rangers (mostly from the Philippines Navy) who do a pretty good job with their limited resources of trying to enforce a no-take policy in an approximately 1000 square km zone around the two atolls. Seasonal weather and rough seas limit the diving to a short period lasting from the end of March until June.
Because it's so far from dry land, it's only accessible via liveaboard.
THE QUALITY OF DIVING
I dived there May 22-26, and the diving was very good. Not quite as good as I had hoped, but very good.
I had a great time, and overall I was very happy with the quality of the diving. We did 4 daytime dives each day and usually had optional night dives (an option which most of us usually declined). Some of the dives especially the late afternoon dives, when the fishes weren't very active and the light was dimming were somewhat disappointing, but most of the dives were very good, with excellent marine life.
Night dives weren't so great.
I've dived in a number of places around the Americas and Caribbean, but my previous experience in the Indian/western Pacific Oceans region is rather limited, so I can't compare Tubbataha to the more famous Indo-Pacific diving destinations . . . but one of the other divers on the boat opined that Tubbataha is overall better than both Sipadan and Komodo where he's dived in the past. He did concede that his cabinmate thought that Sipadan's better, and he agreed that both Sipadan and Komodo offer some attractions lacking at Tubbataha (e.g., a good chance of seeing mantas, good macro life, etc.).
THE EASE/DIFFICULTY OF DIVING
There were a couple of inexperienced divers among us (fewer than 10 dives at the start of the cruise) and one or two others without much more experience, and they did fine on our trip mostly because the divemasters worked closely with them, and because the currents usually weren't very strong. I'd gone there expecting a lot of wild drift dives, but only a few of our dives were really fast rides, and on many of them there was little current. Often, though, the currents are strong and some divers find them to be difficult.
I wish we'd had a few more fast drift dives in strong currents because those tend to attract a lot of marine life.
Because the nearest tide tables are for Puerto Princesa, which is almost 200 km away, the DMs and boat captain can't predict currents very well based upon tide tables so they have to look out into the sea to observe the water movement and plan the dives according to what they see. There were a few drift dives in strong currents, which inexperienced divers might not handle very well.
Almost all of us dived EAN32 for the whole trip. With 4 or 5 dives a day, those few divers not certified for nitrox were more limited in their depths and bottom times, and were more fatigued than the rest of us after a day of diving.
SHARKS, TURTLES, AND RAYS
One really great thing about Tubbataha is the abundance of reef sharks. I love diving with sharks of all sizes and all species from little bamboo sharks and horn sharks to big toothy sand tiger sharks and bull sharks, etc. but I've never before seen so many sharks dive after dive, day after day. I saw well over 100 individual sharks, sometimes by themselves but often in pairs or groups of 3 or 4 to more than a dozen.
Most were whitetip reef sharks, but there were also a number of gray reef sharks and a few blacktip reef sharks as well. Sometimes there were as many as 15 or more reef sharks within my field of view, and of course I didn't see the ones behind me or beyond the range of visibility.
In addition to the toothy ones we saw one nurse shark, and about half the divers on our liveaboard saw one juvenile whale shark the first whale shark ever seen by most of those divers.
Some of us did one dive on air (all the other dives were on EAN32 for most of us) to go deep and look for hammerheads, but we didn't see any. About a 1 in 3 chance at that site, we were told. Still, on that deep dive I saw a lot of big adult gray reef sharks (shallower on the reef, juvenile grays tend to be more common than adults), a great barracuda, some giant trevallies, etc.
I saw turtles usually green; a hawksbill or two on 1 dive out of about 3 or 4. Sometimes it was just one in the distance, and sometimes there were 2 or 3 or more turtles which stayed close to us for a while.
There were some Kuhl's blue-spotted rays and bigger reef rays on occasion, but not a lot as it's mostly vertical or sloping walls from about 12 or 15 meters down to where the reef meets the sand at about 60m or whatever. Mantas visit Tubbataha but we didn't see any. A couple of devil rays and an eagle ray were welcome sights, although I personally only saw one of the devil rays.
REEF FISHES
Reef fishes of all sizes were numerous, and Tubbataha definitely has the greatest diversity of reef fish species I've ever seen. The shallower parts of the reef were swarmed with a good variety of anthias, damsels, surgeonfishes, triggerfishes, wrasses, parrotfishes, etc. My logbook entries reflect thousands of redtooth triggers, hundreds of pyramid butterflyfish, hundreds of humpback snappers, countless misc. unicornfishes and other tangs etc.
I saw a few bumphead parrotfish, a Napoleon wrasse, and tons of many-spotted sweetlips and a lot of diagonal-banded sweetlips plus a number of others. Really big groupers were rare but there were a few, and lots of smaller ones.
Redtooths were the most common triggerfishes (sometimes hundreds to thousands, sometimes in huge aggregations with countless other fishes filter-feeding in the currents), but orange-lined and clown and yellowmargin and titan triggerfishes and others were also fairly common.
Tangs/unicornfishes/surgeonfishes were so numerous and so diverse that I stopped bothering to ID them.
Star, map, white-spotted, blue-spotted, and black-spotted puffers were fairly common. Toward the top of the wall and in the shallows there was also a great diversity of anthias, damsels, surgeonfishes, parrotfishes, triggers, etc.
The sheer number and diversity of reef fishes, especially at shallower depths, were a big part of why one of the divers on our trip said that Tubbataha was overall better than Sipadan and Komodo even though the macro stuff wasn't so great.
Because the fishes were so numerous and so diverse, I can't even begin to account for the great majority of them; I've just noted here a few which I could easily ID.
PELAGIC FISHES
Quite good, although not always in the quantities I would have liked to have seen.
Giant trevallies passed by on about 1 of 3 dives, and we saw ranging from a few individuals to enormous schools of many bluefin trevallies and bigeye trevallies, plus a few black jacks and some rainbow runners and other miscellaneous jacks. Some of the schools of jacks were so big that they obscured the view of everything else, but that was a rather uncommon occurrence. Bluefins and giants and bigeyes seemed to be the most common of the jacks/trevallies.
I only saw 4 or 5 great barracudas, but there were a few schools of pickhandle barracudas and one big school of bigeye barracudas.
I saw tunas on 4 or 5 dives sometimes only one, sometimes with a school of others. I positively ID'd some as dogtooth tunas, but I'm not sure about all of them.
I guess fusiliers and snappers are pelagics, not reef fishes. Schools of bluestreak, blue-and-yellow, lunar, and other fusiliers were present in populations ranging from dozens to thousands sometimes so many fusiliers I couldn't see much of anything else. I hadn't seen a lot of humpback snappers before, so I noticed that they were often present in sizeable schools, and there were also lots of more common/more widely-distributed snappers such as checkered, red, two-spot, five-lined, etc. On the drift dives when the current was really moving, the smaller pelagic fishes joined together with some of the reef fishes to form large aggregations in which it was hard to tell one species from another as they were all swarming around to try to find the best places for plankton-feeding and for evading the predator fishes.
I was a bit disappointed that we didn't have more of those fast drift dives surrounded by thousands of fishes, but overall I was happy to see so many pelagics.
CORALS, SPONGES, ETC.
On the walls, the hard and soft corals were healthy and abundant and the most diverse I've ever seen. At the top of the reef, though, there was a lot of damage from past dynamite fishing. Tubbataha has been somewhat protected from dynamite fishing for about 15 or 20 years, but in shallow waters the legacy of past destructive fishing practices is sadly still very evident. For example, on top of the wall at about 12m 5m, Staghorn Point has a big beautiful area of staghorn and several other types of Acropora sp. corals, but there are occasional craters of dead reef within that area which were obviously caused by past dynamite fishing. Sad to see. But as I said, on the vertical walls the hard and soft corals were fantastic.
Tubbataha had the best and the biggest gorgonians I've ever seen. Most walls had many beautiful small purple gorgonians, and there were also larger sea fans of 2m to >3m diameter bigger than the divers passing by.
Also often bigger than divers, the barrel sponges were the largest I'd ever seen. Some of them were 3m or larger in diameter: truly enormous sponges. The smaller sponges on the walls were also very healthy and very diverse; many species I'd never seen before.
Tunicates were mostly Didemnum molle (colonial) and a lot of beautiful blue ascidians of Rhopalaea sp. or maybe Clavelina sp. (individual); I'm not sure of genus or species. Loads of them, though, whatever they were.
I was disappointed that other invertebrates such as stars and crustaceans and nudibranchs and flatworms etc. were not very abundant, and I didn't see any cephalopods at all.
THE BOAT
I was on the Stella Maris Explorer, owned and operated by Expedition Fleet. Overall I was happy enough with it, although I have only done a few liveaboards before so I don't have much basis for comparison. It wasn't an extremely luxurious boat, but it also wasn't anywhere as expensive as the luxury boats from the Aggressor Fleet or Peter Hughes or whatever.
Our cabin was one of the less expensive ones (on C-deck which was on the lower level) and it was a bit small, but adequate. Other than sleeping, few reasons brought the divers into our cabins for very long; usually we spent our surface intervals, evenings, etc. out on the top decks or in the saloon.
Dive briefings and meals were in the saloon. I enjoyed the meals but vegetarians weren't satisfied even after advising Expedition Fleet beforehand of their dietary preferences. Coffee and tea and water were complimentary but we had to pay for other drinks; San Miguel Pilsen and Light beers were available but there were no wine or spirits for sale.
Unlimited nitrox (EAN32 from a membrane system) cost an extra US$100, or could be purchased by the individual fill.
The crew were mostly great generally very friendly and helpful. In fact, a little too helpful sometimes: I don't like it when other people mess with my kit, but I understand than on many liveaboards it's common for the crew to change cylinders etc. for divers between dives. In the interest of expediency on a tight schedule I let them do some of that, but in doing so they lost the right hip D-ring from my new harness, which didn't make me happy . . . I was teaching a nitrox course and I insisted upon me and my student doing our own O2 content analyses and labeling our bottles which other divers didn't and some of the crew really had a hard time understanding why I was being such a nuisance about doing our own O2 analyses and labels. Once I got my point across, though, they were OK with it and were perfectly accommodating.
There were 15 divers on our trip. Diving was done from 2 skiffs/chase boats with a back-roll entry and a ladder exit after removing kit and passing it up after the dives. Each chase boat had one divemaster/guide. I would have preferred a better DM-to-client ratio (1 to 4, rather than 1 to 8), but 2 more DMs would have made for rather crowded chase boats, and anyway I doubt they had the crew cabin capacity for that.
SUMMATION
Nobody went home unhappy after the trip. The diving was very good, even if it was not quite as mind-blowing as I had hoped it would be.
I'm a shark-lover, so I was really happy to see reef sharks on 4 out of 5 dives sometimes there were 15 or 20 sharks in my field of vision. And although I've seen bigger schools of each of them elsewhere, I was also happy to see so many big silvery pelagics such as jacks and tunas and barracudas.
Better than Sipadan, Komodo, etc.? I can't say because I haven't been to those places yet. One diver says Tubbataha's better than both; another says Tubbataha's not as good. Having seen or not seen the whale shark, devil rays, hawksbill turtles, etc., might have influenced their opinions of how good Tubbataha was.
But rather than comparing Tubbataha to the Maldives or the Red Sea or the Similans or Belize or wherever we've dived in the past, most of the more widely-traveled divers just enjoyed Tubbataha as a new and unique destination with great diving a little bit different from anywhere else we had been in the past. And from that perspective, it was great!
and laughed through her regulator. 
