It's Official

Well after reading 200 plus pages, watching 2 hours of instructional videos, spending a day in the pool with scuba gear on, and doing 5 dives in 2 days, we are officially scuba certified! The last five days are a blur and I feel like I might have grew gills. The trip started with a two hour bus ride to the port city and then a hour long ride on a passenger ferry. As we approached our destination we could see the beach packed with hotels and resorts. This is the first resort area we've been to in the Philippines and it had a different feel. The first big shock was that half the population seems to be American or Europeans. I don't know if I've ever heard so much German spoken before. The other unique thing was the town had a French Bakery and a store that sold Maple Grove Farms salad dressing from Vermont for 150 pesos (about $3.75). While the above water scene was a little bit disorienting the under water scene was amazing. We spent our first two days reading, watching videos, and practicing in the pool. Then we moved into the real big fishbowl the next day. We put on our gear and tip backwards into the water and dropped down to 24 feet below surface. We just kneeled underwater for about an hour practicing all the same things we learned in the pool and then headed back to the surface. By the end of the day we felt a little tired but were definitely excited for the next day. The following morning we made our first real dive in a coral garden area. We went 36 ft. below the surface and saw some beautiful soft coral and different fish species. We had one more dive left in us so later that afternoon we went on a wreck dive that took us 68 ft. below the surface and we got to see 3 different wrecks. The wrecks were interesting but the schools of fish were much more interesting. We saw striped eel catfish, moorish idols, harlequin ghost pipefish. The diving was a lot of fun and we look forward to taking advantage of the wealth of dive sites in the Philippines.