We finally went shipwreck diving! The first dive site was called Kogyo Maru, a Japanese boat from WWII located at approximately 30m deep. The moment we entered, we saw a giant batfish. Such an impressive fish, I love it! It's harder to navigate inside a wreck than over a coral reef because it's dark (even with flashlight), easy to get lost inside the ship, some rooms are small and tight, and there are more risks to get cuts and stings. During this dive, I was simply trying to keep up with the new challenge which is to get through spaces, openings and holes without touching anything. Quite hard actually... There wasn't much going on inside this wreck but the moment we came through the top, it was beautiful. Corals grew on the ship's exterior and fish were swimming everywhere. The weird thing was to see the bubbles coming out of the ship, other divers' bubbles actually. So you can spot the holes in the ship's carcass. Right at the end, we also saw a large lazy grouper chillaxing on a coral.
Before our second dive, we had lunch provided and cooked by a member of the boat crew. So yummy and hearty! It consisted of rice, beans, pumpkins, melons, potatoes and chicken in a kind of tomato sauce. We also had Sprite, Fanta and beer at our disposal. The dessert was bananas.
After a quick swim, we geared up for our 2nd dive, the Tangat wreck. This dive was eventful since we lost Annis and her buddy (found them not long after that), saw a lionfish (so extravagant), almost collide with a big purple jellyfish (Math and I were staring at this big puffy form coming towards us until I realized it was dangerous and swim rapidly away. Rule #1: be calm, swim nice and slow to reduce air consumption. Fail), Nis lost her fin (I clipped it back for her), saw 2 stonefish, a group of batfish and some Nemos, Nis went low on air towards the end and had to share the dive master's air, and last but not least, while we were waiting for 3 min at 5m deep to decompress, a small but long blue and white fish was having fun on Math's tank. It got bold and started going up, down and around his legs. I was laughing so bad (and wasting air) cos' I was pointing it to Math but he couldn't see it.
2 hours later (time to decompress), at 4:09pm, we went for our third and last dive of the day, the Barracuda Lake located on Coron Island. (first time diving in a lake!) The water temperature can go from 28 to 39 degrees because of the different "layers of fresh, salt and brackish waters" (Lonely Planet's words). What this means is that we could swim from hot to cold and vice versa and see the blurry line between them. It was a fun dive because for once, we could disobey rule #2: never touch anything at all time. The dive master went head first into the bottom of the lake which was a smooth and soft mixture of I-don't-know-what. You could really sink into it, put your arm up to the neck into it. We also had cleaner shrimp and native catfish come onto our hands and nibble at our skin. The rock formations on the side of the lake were beautiful when we were out of the water. But under, it was majestic to swim right next to it and to look up at these giant mountains. At the end, we even took off our fins and "climb" up the rocks to the surface. Yup, quite fun!
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