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So whats wreck diving all about then? Well. Exhilarating, frightening, awesome, dangerous etcetc.
Firstly diving in the Philippines seems to be much more exciting because they dont appear to take any notice whatsoever about safety, even though they are safe. Our dive shop is very well respected in diving these wrecks and so i threw caution to the wind and went with it. Boats were great, blah so what about the diving?
Each wreck is at an average of about 25-35m deep, pushing the limits of recreational diving, which from my PADI dive-master i think allows about 20 minutes safe diving before deco-time. Something like that. My first wreck was the deepest, which some people on the boat didn't do. Sitting at 40m deep it appeared to be on its side. Inside and out in and out of engine rooms made for a fantastic if not slightly scary, dark and adventurous dive. I loved it. Cut my hands to shreds on the metal and as you would assume got a bit stuck in some of the tighter holes. Made by airborne torpedoes as you would expect. Great stuff.
As the ships have been there for nearly 70 years, from the outside they look like a normal reef now. The coral is awesome and the dives made for the most fantastic photo opportunities. Shame i had no camera. Saw everything, lionfish, huge gargantuan fan corals, loads of giant trevallies prowling....and so it goes on. Red clownfish were an unusual sighting.
So its once you get out from the wreck that the dive gets a bit exciting, especially without my own dive computer. Being a diver who uses quite a lot of air, spending 20 minutes going up and down in the ship pretty much wipes out all of my air. Then to get to the surface means that we need to make a few deco stops depending on your computer, which i didn't have. So using other peoples we had to hang around at 20m, 15m etcetc. For up to 20 minutes, meaning i pretty much every trip needed to beg borrow and steal everyone elses air. It was only after 3 of us on one dive completely ran our tanks dry that they started throwing tanks over the side of the boat on ropes to help ensure everyone had a safe supply whilst decompressing!! Weird. But great. Sometimes 3 multilevel deep dives in a day, my instructor Dave in Thailand would have had kittens!
I did a week and dived over 10 of the wrecks. They were all awesome. Mostly deep, some wth cargo like upside down bulldozers and cranes and all sorts. Lots of huge anti aircraft guns which were obvioulsy useless! No skeletons though which i thought might be quite funny/authentic!
My favourite was where we dived into the engine rooms, saw the fuel tanks and then excited via the propeller shaft which was tight, eery and made for a really great experience.
So as you can see i did love the wrecks, i would love to do my wreck speciality....
Also managed to sneak in the baracuda lake on my last dive. A strange dive. First you have to rock climb with your tank to get to it. Then as you descend its freshwater, at about the usual 26 degrees. Then at about 14m it turns into seawater which makes a thermoclime. Imagine frosted car windows in a car in the winter. You cannot see anything. Then it gets as hot as bathwater. 37degrees and almost uncomfortable. The strangest thing i have ever seen. I cant be bothered to explain how it got like that.
shrimps clean your fingers. moon
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