Dead Cat Diving Ticket

Moray eel at Kalipayan

In the middle of the night, I woke up because I heard loud noises just outside my bedroom window. The noises sounded like someone walking on the rubbish just outside my window. Fearing it was someone trespassing on the property, I grabbed my combat knife and looked out the window trying to see what was going on. A few intense minutes passed by and it became clear that the noises were caused by my landlord’s dogs rummaging around. Back to sleep.

In the morning, I noticed a dead baby cat on the property’s lawn. It was small, thin, and lifeless. I couldn’t tell if the dogs killed it or found it already dead. Perhaps it was the baby of the previous cat they killed? Regardless, it was gross and thankfully my landlord is good at cleaning dead cats up.

I drove to Alona Beach to figure out the status of my open plane ticket from Tagbilaran to Manila. I took it to a travel agent there 6 days ago hoping they can just schedule the flight for me. I previously got a text from the agent that they booked a flight but it will cost money. My open ticket is paid for, just not scheduled. This isn’t a good sign. When I got to the travel agent, she was on lunch break. I had to come back later.

I went to Coco Vida to check email and to meet up with Sara and Martine because Sara wanted to dive in the afternoon. Martine stuck around Coco Vida doing work while Sara, Sander and I went to go dive. We dived at Kalipayan which I didn’t mind doing again. The main thing we were looking for was a ghost pipefish.

Ghost pipefish after I blew it away and swam back down.

The dive was great though at one point in the dive I felt a little uncomfortable for some reason. The first thing we saw immediately on descent was a moray eel. I tried hard to find the robust ghost pipefish around the wreck but couldn’t find any. Later in the dive, Sara found an ornate ghost pipefish in a sea fan. It was beautiful, but at one point I accidentally blew it away with my bubbles while taking a picture of it. Sander found it above us and managed to push it back down to the sea fan.

The low angle of the sun makes nice lighting along the reef.

Large lionfish with a nudibranch in the background.

We saw a lot of life underwater. After the ghost pipefish, we saw several different nudibranches, a shrimp, a yellow frogfish, and a large lionfish. Towards the end of the dive, in the shallows, Sander spotted a blue-black nudibranch on the sand. Then, I spotted a couple others, and he found a few more. We ended up finding at least 8 nudibranchs in the same area. We swam farther and found at least another 10 nudbranchs! We called it the nudibranch fiesta.

Sara examines the live urchins the staff at Genesis were eating.

After the dive, we hung out at Genesis until dinnertime when I went to Oops for dinner. It was getting late in the evening and I was too lazy to drive home and cook. I forgot to go to the travel agent and ended up leaving Oops at 8:30 PM when the travel agent closes. Luckily, the agent was still working. I dropped in to ask what the deal with my ticket was.

After 6 days of waiting for my ticket to be scheduled, all the travel agent did was buy me another ticket for the time I asked. I thought she knew what an open ticket meant but I don’t think she does. I asked them what I should do and another person there said it’s probably best to cancel my open ticket and use the one they bought. Couldn’t they just call the airline -- which they already did -- to schedule my open ticket? I insisted they cancel the ticket they booked and I will just call the airline as long as they gave me the number to call. The number she gave me was completely different from the number on the airline’s website. Wonderful, that was a big waste of time.


- jason