An earlier start today for a spot of work related activity then back to the room for 06.00 to commence camera and coffee related activities. Really loving the black coffee now (as long as it is served with a couple of Oreos).

A brief power outage was dealt with in the customary fashion.

This mornings dives are Napantao and Marayag so a combination of an amazing wall in an MPA and a muck dive where we all be looking for, well, anything!

Breakfast shortly, I really should try something different but the eggs on toast are properly lovely so it might be tough.

Slightly overcast this morning (though it seems not to stop the sunburn), we shall be heading across the bay into an area protected from the prevailing winds though they tend to die off when the sun comes out anyway.

As we approach the far side of the bay the wind drops and we pick up the mooring in near mirror flat water.

The first dive is an outstanding wall dive with hydrozoa hanging at all levels, a small yellow painted frog fish is hiding inside one of them. We turn around just after 30 minutes into the dive to make our way back on top of the reef. The sun has come out and the colours are amazing.

Back on the boat it’s coffee and biscuit time as we move south a little to the next site.

After a suitable surface interval we drop in onto a bland sandy seabed and make our way down to about 20m, on the way around we see a mimic octopus, shrimps, nudibranches and crabs. A great dive which ended up being 70 minutes, nice.

Back on board, coffee, biscuits and banana!

The trip back is on a lovely flat sea though it’s tropically raining!

Back on shore for lunch which for me is stir fried cabbage and shredded beef with chilli, nice. Jo went for the BLT.

Back on board we find ourselves sharing with a group of trainee divemasters with their associated AOW students. They are about to do a drift dive, the current is boring through the moorings like there’s no tomorrow and they are briefing their students to get in and hold on to a rope. Well, from our perspective this had failure written all over it. Three of them get in and can barely hang on. Fortunately, common sense prevails and or guides step in. The dive is reconfigured, the boat is moved and the students all drop in where there is no current.

We kit up and drop in the same place (which is where we had planned to jump anyway) and we have a lovely dive spending the first 30 minutes between 20 and 25m until we hit the current at which point we rapidly conclude that the best thing is to just go with.

We enjoy what might be described as a fairly swift drift. After signalling with our guide we confirm that the exit point has changed from the moored boat to the shore so we slowly reduce our depth, complete the safety stop and then step gracefully from the torrent right on to the beach in front of SBSR.

The students all survived and managed to view a passing whaleshark, or so they say, no pictures, no proof! That’s the second one we’ve missed.

Back on dry land our kit is taken away for dry cleaning and we sort cameras, wet clothes, loggin’ and bloggin’.

Apparently it’s now time for me to suffer another trouncing at crib. Stand by for the results.

……and, yes, royally trounced, no, not once but twice. We agree not to take crib to the restaurant!

Dinner is yet another super tasty combination of Bicol Express (a spicy pork dish) and some stir fried vegetables, all preceded by the now ubiquitous deep fried Lumpia. All washed down with Red Horse or Sprite according to your preference!

SBSR do a mean double gin and Sprite, night night Jo.