The dive doubled up as the deep dive required for my AOWD certification. One of the tasks during the deep dive is to look at what happens to colors underwater. For this purpose, I carried a small slate with a sample of colored swatches printed on it. In theory, I knew what was supposed to happen to the colors, but seeing it proven with my own eyes was something else altogether. At a depth of 27 meters, the colors - red, orange, yellow, green, and blue on the surface - turned to dark brown, ocher, dark yellow, green and blue. Fascinating!
After the shark dive we had a big break until the afternoon - enough time to walk back to my hotel and catch up on sleep. The hotel was about a ten minute walk from the dive center, all along a lovely sand path like this one:
In the afternoon, a navigation dive was the next of my five dives. Compass navigation underwater is a little tricky as it is, but today it was complicated by a medium strong current that made swimming in straight lines and square patterns quite challenging.
And then, after a tiny break, it was already time for the day's third dive: the night dive. For that, it was really convenient that it gets dark at around 6pm in the Philippines - no need to stay up to go night diving! There is a very popular spot for night diving in Malapascua because the colorful mandarinfish come out there at sunset to mate. They didn't seem to mate tonight, but they were there for us to admire anyway. Among the other fish we spotted in the torchlight were bobtail squid and seahorses. Ascending at the end of the dive, I looked up at the surface and was amazed: there were hundreds of tiny dots patterning the surface. I had never seen this before, and I guess the torchlight added to my confusion, so I didn't figure it out until we were actually on the surface: it was raining!
