Day 367: Anniversary Diving

To celebrate my one year of travel anniversary today, I treated myself to a package of three dives in the vicinity of Coron. The first dive was in Barracuda lake on Coron island. Barracuda lake is interesting because it has both a halocline and a thermocline. The top layer is fresh water (unlike most other places with haloclines, where it's the other way around). With about 30°C, the fresh water is also much cooler than the salt water, which goes up to as much as 39°C. For the first time ever, I was not even a little cold at the end of the dive, but instead very glad to go up to the cool fresh water again. After all, this was a dive and not a visit to the hot springs! Apart from the temperature, the lake was really quite boring. There was next to no underwater life in it, and to compensate for the lack of sights, the guide started fooling around with the extremely loose soil at the bottom. At one point, he swam head first into the ground, burying himself from head to shoulders. Maneuvers like that ruined the visibility, of course, leaving a little less of nothing to see.

Back on the boat, I noticed that the array of tanks we had brought really looked quite impressive, taking into account that there were only five of guests and two guides on board.

The second dive was a lot more interesting than the first one. What makes Coron an interesting place to go diving is the amount of shipwrecks you can find here. Almost all of them belonged to the Japanese navy, sunk by the US sometime during the second world war. So our second dive took us to one of the wrecks, the Tangat. I was amazed by how populated the wreck was, after only 60 years in the water. On its outside, there was almost no metal exposed to the water - everything was covered with coral. Hiding in the coral was a great assortment of reef fish, especially lots and lots of lionfish. With one guide leading us and one guide bringing up the rear, we could even enter the wreck and explore the cargo holds inside - amazing!

The third dive was another wreck, the Olympia. It was just as populated as the Tangat, but lying on its side rather than standing upright. The inside was even more interesting as the first wreck's inside because there were traces of the ship's crew remaining: a shoe sole lying in a corridor (the rest of the shoe rotted away, I guess), a broken toilet bowl, and a board with plaques showing the crew's names.

In terms of sheer beauty, these were maybe not the best dives I've done, but in terms of awe and fascination they're definitely among the top ranking ones!

On the two hour boat ride back to Coron, we passed some more stunning little islands that seem to be typical for this part of the world :-)