Official dive vacation thread
 

I just read Myka's thread about her upcoming dive trip the Philippines and I am so jealous! The Philippines and Indonesia have been on our bucket list but the travel time and expense always steers us pack to the Caribbean.
Anyhow, I thought I would start a thread for the dive members of the forum to post their dive vacation plans and trip reports.
My divebuddy/spouse and I are heading to Cozumel for two weeks on January 23rd. We haven't been to Coz since 2012 and are looking forward to returning. We also plan on taking the ferry over to the mainland and catching a taxi down to Akumal tovisit an old dive instructor friend in Akumal if things go as planned.
Please post your photos and video from your dive trips!

Awesome, I love Cozumel! I really enjoyed Kauai, Hawaii too (my fav place so far), and the Cook Islands were amazing. You already know my plans! Philippines! :D

I'm headed to Cabo, Loretto and Puerto Vallarta Jan 8-18. Bringing my GoPro with the new Intovatek lights :)

Me and my wife love Cozumel too quick trip you can stay in a bed and breakfast for like 325$ for 10 days and the diving and food is cheap , we dove with
scuba tony dive company last time and I couldn't say more good things about them


Here is a quick go pro video of our last dive trip there


http://youtu.be/Fel_0EN0-qg

Has anyone been to roatan or Honduras is another close by place for a quick dive getaway we were thinking of jetting away on April ish next year and thinking doing a 10ish day dive trip any one been

I've dove Utila which is another little island 30 min or so ferry ride from Roatan. If you time it right they get whale sharks out there.
I was there shortly after a couple big storms had passed through and the viz wasn't great and there was still large swells rolling through.

Might be my PC but the link is'nt working for me

Nice vid! Is that the Palancar reef along the edge of the wall? We took a ride in that submarine that went along an area that looks a lot like your video - we got lucky and sat right behind the captain. It was a neat experience. We didn't see any rays or turtles off Cozumel - a few Nurse Sharks, and TONNES of Barracuda (like every 30 feet). Not so many fish as you see in Hawaii.

We were looking at Roatan and staying at Anthony's Key Resort . The diving and the resort look really nice but as I recall it was a schlep getting there and we have lots of Air Miles so we decided on going to Cozumel direct from Toronto.

Agreed! We are staying at Mi Casa, $610 for two weeks and about 2 blocks from the water. We have not booked a dive op yet but thinking about going with Aldora based on their great reviews.

Snorkelling
 

I dont dive but snorkel and a friend is letting me borrow his go pro for when we go to Thailand in January so if i get anything cool hopefully i can figure it out and will be able to post it here

Yea that's the place we stayed at mi casa was awesome we got the room with a kitchen and bought our own breakfast stuff cause we were too early for their breakfast usually before our dives good spot


Also yes we did dive palancar reefs while there :) man took so much more video in Indonesia and as I'm editing it I'm regretting it lol

Just came back from the Big Island where I was able to get a couple tanks in. Not as much as I'd like, next time there's an opportunity for me to do "diving while on vacation" I hope it can be more of a "diving vacation." (Not that I didn't appreciate all the other things we did though, I love it in Hawaii.)

One dive was down to 80' and unfortunately a little overcast so my non-extra-light GoPro pictures are not terribly good. When time permits I will see what I can salvage and share.

One heartbreaking thing I saw was a lot of coral bleaching. One reason I keep going back to the Big Island was just how vibrant the coral colours were, porites, pocilliporas and others, lots of pinks and yellows ...... this year so much white. :cry:

On closer inspection I could see that the coral was still alive, just bleached. So one thing we can say, with the experience we get in this hobby .. is that we know that if conditions allow, they can recover. The flipside though is that, with the experience we get in this hobby ... is that if things don't get better quickly, the potential to dieoff is also there. So it is with no small measure of mixed emotions on my part this time around.

Tony, did you give any consideration into doing the manta ray night dive?

Ugh...that's no good. I can't imagine the conditions in the ocean changing quickly to reverse the bleaching... :(

We did it as a snorkel 2 years ago which was pretty amazing becaus they come a lot closer to the surface than the bottom, but I think you'd get better pictures looking upwards from the bottom so I did want to do the dive this time around. Unfortunately circumstances caused us to cancel that. Basically we ran out of money. The USD exchange rate right now is brutal. :-(

Yup. We seriously looked at going to Kona this winter but the exchange rate killed that idea. Someday....

Yep, it was 1.375 on my CC. When you're talking thousands...it escalated quickly. :(

Here is my video from diving in the Galápagos Islands last spring. Amazing place

http://youtu.be/txTjzcw1Fv0

Beautiful! Did you see any hammerheads?

I sure did. I think there is a clip of them somewhere in the video but it's from the side and in the distance so can't really tell. Was a very cool experience

While I'm sure there are tons of reason's for coral bleaching, there was an interesting article in DAN's Alert Diver that's a good read and a fairly seeming simple remedy if more people knew...

http://www.alertdiver.com/Sunscreens-Coral-Bleaching

My wife and I will be going to Okinawa, Japan in March 2016, diving at the Zamami Islands. We've never done any scuba before (taking the cert in new year), although I have done some snorkeling in Hawaii many moons ago. Really looking forward to it!

fish and sps
 

A few years ago I had the chance to snorkel and dive the Philippines, Bali and the gili islands.
Philippines were cheap and beautiful. Tons of fish and incredible massive colonies of sps!!!! I was in boracay. For incredible sps color Bali gets my vote. The snorkeling in sanur absolutely blew my mind!!! Have fun in the Philippines!!!

I don't dive but I was in the Philippines couple of years ago,. Heading back to Palawan next February. Here's the video of me snorkeling in Palawan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzIrq71z5yQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szgDjZt7mcs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfwqpHJYRoE

That is one packed reef!

No kidding! ^

So many sharks - awesome!!!

Saw my first shark while snorkeling, off St.John's (Caribbean) a couple weeks ago. Startled me as he was right under me about 10 ft down, so quietly got out of there as fast as I could... Turned out to be just a nurse shark (not supposed to be dangerous),... but I didn't know that at the time. Was about 6 - 8 ft long.

A couple of years ago in Belize, our dive operator let us use spearguns on all of our dives to hunt lion fish. The smaller lion fish would get fed to the nurse sharks right off the spear. It got to the point where the sharks would follow us on the dives.

The larger lions were bagged and brought back to the boat for a beach bbq.

Cool! I want to eat lionfish.

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

grilled lionfish is yummy!

those are the days when we use to free dive at a nearby reef and a catch lionfish. :smile:

Just got home from the Philippines yesterday. 3rd time there beautiful country! Try to go back every year
This time around went to Puerto Galera, El Nido, Dingalan, Tagaytay. Wanted to dive in Galera but the weather wasnt on our side, windy most of the time, mainly cloudy with some rain. So just went snorkelling there.
El Nido was beautiful but the coral diving isn't as great there so took some tours and one day of diving which turned out to be just one dive out of 2 as i was having difficulty breathing. After a several minutes decidided i needed to go back up and when i got the surface i released the velcro strap on the BCD and wow i could breath! Turns out the fitted me with an XXS vest :( . Should've known when suiting up for a back roll as i had to exhale to get the strap on so my lung capacity maxed out at probably 40%. Live and learn, non-PADI cerified dive shop and not the greatest equipment

Anyhoo heres some pics, i dont really feel like uploading videos

This is flying into El Nido on a direct charter. Way better than the 7hour bumby bus ride from the Puerto Princessa airport but turned out to be really expensive, oh well. The last pics are snorkelling in Puerto Galera near Coral Garden Resort just north of the Giant clams site
http://i.imgur.com/P2joarF.jpg
^^ Our private boat captain Austin ^^

Some coral pics in Puerto Galera. Tried to get some macro shots while snorkelling in the current... a lot of them were too blurry
http://i.imgur.com/nRjfKpv.jpg

A mixture of Puerto Galera and El Nido snorkelling
http://i.imgur.com/InEar3L.jpg
To be continued next year...

Fantastic colours!!

Beautiful
Is that with a filter or flash?
thanks

Ya great photos! What type of camera/lenses are you using?

Awesome pics, thanks for sharing your experiences on your Philippine trip.

Yes El Nido is not the best for diving in Palawan. There are 2 dive sites that comes to my mind in Palawan, #1. is Tubbataha and #2 Taiei Maru Wreck in Coron. Don't know if you have dove those sites.

Coral reefs in Coron are better than El Nido.

Another Dive site that I would recommend is Apo Reef in Mindoro and Apo Island in Domaguete. There lots of awesome dive sites in the south.

I'm planning to go back home this summer and will stay in Palawan and Mindoro (my home town).

Thanks, thanks and thanks. No Filter or flash. Same camera ive used to take pics of corals in the buy sell but with those i never mess with the colours just white balance with the cam, crop and resize. But with some of these pics i turned up the saturation a bit in photoshop to get rid of some of the haze from sediment and plankton on the windy days. Its an Olympus point and shoot underwater, TG something (can't see the model #), just stock no lense. The cheaper version of the TG3/4

Thanks and no worries.
The 2nd picture from the plane is above Apo reef but unfortunatley forgot our parachutes :biggrin:

Yeah I've been to Coron definitely some amazing corals there, just snorkeled but will for sure go back on the next trip or 2. Tubbataha is somewhere i'd love to go but with the 3-4 weeks vacation per year and in a relationship with a non-diver its a bit of a long journey time wise and for her sake so that may never happen. And wrecks i've done a few and so far not really much of a fan would kinda rather see pristine natural coral reefs.
When you go back bring your cam and share some pics!

And sorry to post these in the dive thread, none of them are actually dive pics this time. The camera is only rated for 10 metres but our first dive was to 18 so didnt wanna risk a leak :wink:

If anyone is bored and feels like watching almost an hour of my crappy video skills, lol. Here's a dive I did in Cabo by the fairly newly discovered wreck out by the Arches. I believe the dive spot is called Land's End.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNjfoy5I9o8
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJRzxNS_Ukk
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp2JeDp86nA