We managed to pull ourselves away from the beach and pool to do a day trip out to Balicisag island.
The eels we saw were quite active.
They are quite big when you actually see the whole body.
There are lots of grasses growing around these dive sites so we saw many turtles.
They were munching away in between going up for air.
Aside from the big things these sites have lots of little things.
The turtles kept swimming by and distracting us.
They would swim quite close as they are probably quite used to divers given the number of boats we saw during the low season.
As we swam away from the turtles and the grasses more patches of coral appeared.
Again there were lots of small fish that I can’t remember their common names or species.
We started pretty shallow so the light was pretty good.
Eventually we made it away from the sandy bottom towards a drop off.
There were may many fish hanging around.
We got to see our first frogfish. It’s right there in the middle.
And another little yellow one.
The wall stretched on and on and was covered with coral.
There were a few schools of larger fish.
We could get really up close and see all the nudibranches hanging out.
There were several cool butterfly fish hanging out.
The nudibranches were some of the coolest stuff and were easy to spot and quite large.
The turtles came by to see what we were checking out.
There were some really brightly coloured crinoids. The things that look a bit like feather dusters.
There were some really big corals growing on their own as well.
There were no shortage of anemones in the Philippines.
There were lots of clownfish hanging out.
There were more fish we hadn’t seen before.
More nudibranches were crawling around in the open areas.
There were several different types of sea squirts. These blue ones and the green ones in the lower left.
The anemones could get pretty big growing on their own rocks.
In addition to large anemones, we saw large sponges.
And as we had mentioned before, very large coral growths.
Here’s a good example of one of the really bright crinoids.
The reef had so many different things growing all over each other.
There were a good number of starfish hanging out as we were exploring.
Here’s a great example of all the different colours of crinoids that we saw.
Some of the nudibranches had very bright red edges.
What would a set of reef pictures be without a vague description of seeing orange and blue fish.
In the Philippines there are more orange than blue fish it would seem.
Looking up the turtles were grabbing some air right above us.
They looked really neat diving down right past us and the other divers.
This just looked neat. No idea what is growing on top of the underlying coral.
The medium sized fish hide in the larger crevices while the little ones are right in between coral.
It was cool to see the different colours that the nudibranches could be.
Some of the crinoids would also grow quite large.
This stuff was really cool to watch because the little ends would open in close in a pulsating manner.
This nudibranch had the craziest colour pattern we had seen.
There were some bigger fish that would swim by occasionally, but most of the things we saw were little.
These two clown fish were quite happy with their tiny anemone.
The sea cucumbers were really cool looking. This one was taking a walk and grabbing some food with those pads you can see around the bottom of the picture.
They were quite large and well camouflaged.
The anemones were really cool looking, sadly this one had no resident fish.
On our second tank we went the other way and the current was quite a bit stronger as you can see with everything pointing the one direction.
This is a starfish I think based on the radial symmetry.
Here’s another example of the current with everything flattened down.
We had to swim pretty hard just to keep still enough for a picture.
All the fish were also swimming hard to stay in place.
This anemone was very populated.
This boxfish seemed pretty unimpressed by our picture taking.
And finally a cool different looking starfish to end with our adventure underwater in the Philippines.
