Apo Reef Underwater Sights

At the end of April we went to an island just South of Luzon. Just off Mindoro is a reef called Apo Reef with an island in the middle. We didn't stay at the island, but rather slept overnight under the stars on an awesome house boat. The diving there was really spectacular and our Swiss guide Michael really knew the dive sites!

 We did our first night dive - quite an experience - a wreck dive, a deep dive and a bunch of other fun dives. 

Here's a few pics care of our friends the Knappets :-)

Barracuda...I sincerely hope I spelled that correctly!

On our night dive, we saw some incredible creatures. One of them was this crab. 

Funky crab that disguises itself with coral.

This is a map of where we went. 

We saw a number of shark on our dives. Everything from black tips to sharks that slept on the sea floor...totally incredible! They were more afraid of us than we were of them!

Several times, we saw these spotted fish. I was amazed to find out they are called Sweetlips :-) The wreck dive had big ones!

Sweetlips!

This turtle was awesome! He/she didn't just rush off like all the others I've seen to date. The turtle chilled and let us get some really good pics of it.

On the night dive, just as we were surfacing, we saw this squid. It's wonderful to see different animals you don't see during the day, on a night dive.

So my family might be a little freaked to know we dived with a sea snake. According to our helper, this snake isn't aggressive but rather friendly. Either way, the first one I saw, I literally changed direction in a split second and finned distance between myself and it...as if I could swim away. I was bargaining on plenty of other options for food between myself and the snake :-) Apparently the local name for it is Walowalo.
The second snake I saw, this one, I decided to go in for a slightly closer investigation. It looked a little more energetic than the first, so I decided to move away.

The trumpet fish is one of Brad's favourites, and it's super easy to tell someone you saw a trumpet fish underwater :-) Just play air trumpet :-)

I said earlier in this post that the sharks were black tips, but now I'm not so sure, because this one is a white tip. Either way, there a number of sharks. The diving community will have to forgive me for not knowing my sharks, or other animals for that matter, too well yet :-)