the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

9 November to 21 December 2009. November 9 to 20. First birthday in Davao in 14 years. November 21 to 22. Joint birthday trip to Puerto Galera with Jemi. November 23 to 26. East Asian Seas Congress, Manila. November 26 to December 19. Dumaguete, thesis research and Philippine leg with Rich. December 19 to 20. Alabang with Baculios.

28 a 31 mayo 2009, La Herradura, Almunecar, Spain. Scientific Diving class on the Mediterranean side of Spain, and a trip to Granada afterwards (but no pictures here yet).

15 October 2008. Skipped a seminar to dive in 15-degrees water with my classmate Akilah, from Trinidad and Tobago. Everyone else was weraing dry suits, but we were wearing wetsuits and NO gloves. Couldn't feel my hands (or legs) when I climbed up the ladder. The very important thing we learned here is that unlike in tropical waters, you are not allowed to take off any of your gear (or your regulator from your mouth) while you are getting on the boat after the dive. With two tanks on my back and 9 kg of weights around my waist, it was only by the grace of God I made it back up :P

Start:      Oct 15, '08 1:00p End:      Oct 15, '08 5:00p Location:      Plymouth, UK first time to dive in the English Channel in English weather :D ...or in a freshwater quarry if the weather's really bad. either way, it will be a totally different experience from all the other dives i've had anywhere else, because i'll be wearing either a semi-dry or dry suit :P hope i don't shiver too much.

Well yes, if you didn't know yet, corals ARE animals. And what's more, they're CARNIVOROUS, meaning they eat other animals. And they have harpoon thingies that they shoot out at night to reel in their prey. However, this one here is the soft coral Xenia , which probably just filters the water for nutrients instead of actively catching tiny animals (called "zooplankton") with stinging cells (called "nematocysts"), the way the hard corals do. And I just found out now from Google that they're actually popular with aquarium enthusiasts because of their "pulsing". I just thought it was cool how they look like flowers opening and closing :D And I thought you'd find it cool, too, so I took a video of them in action. Taken off Pulaobato, Balabac, Palawan (near Malaysia) last April.

May 2007. My first dive in Anilao, Batangas for the last leg of our research expedition last summer got me a video of this baby Plectorhincus chaetodonoides , a kind of sweetlips (you know they're sweetlips because they have very big lips :P). They look very different when they grow up, yellow with black spots like a leopard, but when they're young, they look as if they're wearing this spotted dress and swim as if they're dancing like crazy! One theory is that they try to imitate the poisonous flatworm so that they won't get eaten. I think they're just amusing haha.

April 2007. On our last dive in Tubbataha for our research expedition (three days of uncharacteristically rough seas and few sharks :(), I got my precious gift: close-up stills of a turtle resting on some corals and, when it still didn't move away after so many shots, a video of it gliding in the strong current and finally descending down the wall of the North Atoll.

15 to 16 September 2007. My first real field trip as a teacher, and of course, Murphy's Law went into full swing even though I'd called the shipping lines more than a week before the trip and got reserved seats two days before the trip. So half of us got left behind at the pier. By the time we got to the island, the tide was too high for our lab exercise, and some people HAD to go home that same afternoon. No time to do the scheduled itinerary. So I decided to at least let them have some fun after all that stress. I chose Cambugahay Falls, because I had the impression many of them had never been to any waterfall yet. It was also my underwater casing's first time in a freshwater setting (at last! considering that it was a trip to Kawasan last year that convinced me i really had to buy an underwater casing to capture a friend's expression as we rafted under the waterfall). And here's evidence that people tend to have more fun with waterfalls than at sea. (Must be th...

forgive me if i have no words for now. they have never come at my bidding as easily as they did to you, but especially now, when i myself refuse to listen and to receive them. because to listen would be allow myself to grieve, and to grieve would be to say that you are no longer part of my world. and i cannot do that just yet. not when so many still grieve and need to be comforted. they need to hear the stories first, how you made this world beautiful, and all the unanswerable questions about why you decided to leave it without even telling us you were planning this new adventure. i will let them have their time with you. and when everyone else is done, i will embrace you one last time, and perhaps finally know how let you go. when i held your hand at the hospital, it was still warm, and i could not believe you would ever choose to leave. how would you expect me to when we have always both believed in the constancy of the moon and the early mornings? somehow, during the course of...

and finally, the marine creatures we can all relate to: fish! except that some of them come in forms that might not be so comfortable for some to look at. i've arranged these from the cute anemonefish to the bigger groupers, the edible schools, the odd-looking ones (which are still fish, by the way, have no doubt about that), to my first decent photos of a turtle and a shark, both taken in tubbataha at no deeper than 20 feet.

ok, so by now you're probably saying, "what the..?". in english, it just means sea slugs, sea cucumbers, and other invertebrates (uh...animals without backbones). that's seastars mostly, a giant clam, and two slipper lobsters. so i've always had a problem shooting nudis because they're so small, and my camera has a problem focusing on tiny things, and i get swept by the current so my shots come out blurred, yada yada yada. but since i was diving every day for 20 days in palawan and 3 days in batangas (with EXTREMELY strong currents), pretty soon i learned how to do it properly, i.e. getting them sharp AND with the right colors. what makes nudis so fascinating is, again, their incredible variety in color and pattern--the more flamboyant, the more poisonous. don't say they didn't warn you.

looking for a unique wedding motif? why not try a coral reef? (hey, that rhymes!) if you've ever wondered why divers make so much fuss over coral reefs, well, here's my answer to it. come to think of it, i never really appreciated them as i did this summer--all the gorgeous colors and shapes made up of corals, algae, sponges, ascidians, and bryozoans that collectively we call the reef community. and i still find it amazing that we have a God who creates pink corals =D (when he could've just fashioned some boring stones for fish to live in) pictures from my palawan and batangas research expeditions (22 April to 9 May and 19 to 23 May, 2007, respectively). one of the most important things i learned during the trip was the value of custom white balance underwater. yes folks, no more messing with flash and strobes for me (at least while i still can't afford therm =P). and the rest, as they say, is history....

04 Feb 07 – Dauin, Negros Oriental. It was a lesson in seeing. Visibility wasn’t very good because of the weather, the sites were mostly just brown sand and seagrass with virtually no corals, but never did I see so many fascinating creatures in a single dive day as diving with The Aquanuts – Joy & Kevin, Fred, Sol, Paulo, Eric, Barbie, and of course, Ana, who lately I see only when the moon is full ;-) Five minutes into the first dive and the group was already gathered round a pile of rocks and sponges, like paparazzi complete with strobes, clicking away at THREE ghost pipefish—and many divers dive again and again without seeing a single one. As if that wasn’t enough, there was also a pair of black-and-white fiddler-looking crabs and a pair of shrimps under the same rock. A few meters away, we find a teeny tiny frogfish on a block of cement. A few minutes later, another pipefish, different species this time. And on and on and on. Certainly it couldn’t have been accidental, the way ...

31 December 2006. A fitting end to mark the year when I rediscovered Davao's reefs. Second time in Aundanao, where we went camping in 2005 , but first time to go to Big and Small Ligid Islands, or even see that side of Davao Gulf. The best I've seen in Mindanao yet.

November 11, 2006. First dive of the semester =) Even though had a headache from a beginning cold and cough, went diving anyway to try out my brand new regulator and gauges =D my buddy, ian ray, assembled my reg for me. (of course, all headaches and illnesses disappeared underwater, as they always do)

October 25, 2006 - Off Samal Island. Only three days since I arrived from New York, with a slight headache from jetlag, and I was itching to use my new diving gear. I called the dive shop (082-305-DIVE) when I got home at 3 p.m. from some errands and learned that there was a night dive that night, meeting time at 4 p.m. To dive or not to dive? Not too hard to answer, headaches notwithstanding. This dive, my last one in Davao before I move to Dumaguete next week, was also one with many firsts: 1) first night dive in Davao 2) first time to dive with my very own wetsuit and dive computer =D 3) first time to do underwater night photography =D It was hard, I tell you, especially since my last night dive was more than a year ago. Plus, only had a puny Eveready flashlight to illuminate the darkness. Hard to shoot holding both a flashlight and a camera. Fortunately, one of my buddies, Dave, had a $750-super-bright rechargeable LED light strong enough for me to shoot without a flash, and at de...

September 12, 2006. Was supposed to dive at Apo, but it was too late to make arrangements, so we decided to go Dauin instead. First time to dive in a black/gray sand setting, and what a great experience it was! We went down maximum 15 feet because the currents were really, really strong, but in exchange, we saw these jacks schooling at that depth (usually they're found in open sea). You'll notice that my shot is pretty unsteady--that's the current dragging me along, and you'll see in the video how fast it is.

September 10, 2006. One of the rare occasions I used my underwater camera on video mode. I've always loved looking at schools of fusilier, and here's a perfect example why.

September 11 and 12, 2006. I'm skipping a couple of trips, dives and melodramatic events in my life to upload this album of my visit to Dumaguete via Lilo-an, Santander, Cebu and my amazing dives in two sanctuaries in Dauin to give you (and me) a glimpse of my future home and lifestyle. Just a selection of the most interesting things I saw on the trip. I'm so excited already! PS my new website header (the one you see above) is a picture from the masaplod norte sanctuary in dauin. super strong currents! was hardly moving even though i was finning like crazy. but perfect visibility. also the turtles up there i cut out from a picture of an anemone that you will see below =)

September 10, 2006. so i insisted on bringing josrique, who had just gotten his open water diving license in davao , on this trip so he could see more of cebu and get to cross to dumaguete as well. we'd just come from diving in mactan, and were promised two dives the day after courtesy of club fort med and pacific cebu resort so i could write about boljoon's underwater attractions. we knew we would be diving with some japanese, but we didn't know the pair were sisters until we were suiting up. took them on a tour of boljoon's historic church after the dives--their first time inside a catholic church, and their first time on a tricycle =) afterwards exchanged japanese and tagalog phrases over dinner: "onaka ipai" = "busog" and "watashiwa anataga s'ki" = "gusto kita". food and love--perfect dinner converstaion, don't you think? Open Water Diver status: Josrique - 10 days Ane Yumiko - 4 years Ate Jeneen - 5 years Namiko - 6 ...