The Ona Experience
After four days at Coron, I continued diving on board the Ona Experience for another four days.
Arrived Le Sereneta Restaurant where the ships docked, checked in with the Mexican owner, Yamil and met up with the other guests from all over the world. There were altogether only 8 of us (guests) who came from Australia, Zurich, France, Israel, Norway, Spain and Singapore.
It was a big boat which cater for 16 divers so all of us had a cabin to ourselves happily. However, the boat did not sail until the next morning due to an engine problem and there was no water to use. We were quite disappointed and felt cheated of losing a day and the loss of dives in Apo Reef. All of us were obviously anticipating diving the world's second largest contiguous coral reef system and largest in the Philippines.
The Diving
Apo Reef is located on the western waters of Occidental Mindoro Province in the Mindoro Strait. There are three islands with Apo Island being the largest where you can see beach goers, snorkelers and picnickers.
The diving was a bit over-exaggerated on many websites. Maybe our operator was not professional enough. We dive in the blue on most of our dives searching for Threshers, sharks etc. Most of the time we descend right to 30 m at least and swim in blue and ran out half our tank. There was no nitrox available and all the search and waiting for a congregation of sharks had wasted our air. We did see a huge shark, and giant tuna when we looked down to about 50 m (we were at about 30 m) with good visibility.
On some of the reef dives, we saw a few the normal size white tips and black tips, turtles and the common topical fishes. The night dives and the Karma wreck was the best dive site we dove. There were the uncommon sea slugs, nudibranch and jellyfishes and beautiful coral on the wreck blew me away.
More pictures can be viewed here
Enjoy my movie ...
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