Bouncing Buoyancy Fiesta

Fiesta parade with marching bands and beauty queens.

A marching band was playing outside my room this morning again. It’s the second day of fiesta and was in full force on the beach. There were many different schools marching along on the beach. It was quite festive actually.

Local enjoying the water.

At around 9:30 AM, I met up with Alli, Grace, and Mike because Mike was going to do a wreck Adventure Dive towards his Advanced Open Water (AOW) course. We went to Sabang Wreck where Grace led, Alli supervised and I buddied up with Mike. We descended quite nicely but at the bottom I noticed Mike had lots of buoyancy problems.

He had enough weights but would add too much air to his BCD and then not be able to position his body to release the air when he was positively buoyant. No matter what I would tell him underwater, he wouldn’t do it right. During the whole dive I had to hold on to him to help him control his buoyancy. The dive was more of an exercise in controlling buoyancy than looking at a wreck. It was a dive from hell for me, one of the worst divers I’ve seen. Oddly, he seemed fine on the Discover Scuba dive.

After the dive, Alli decided to halt Mike’s Adventure dives and just have him spend a dive with me practicing his buoyancy. At 2:30 PM, Mike and I went on a dive to the shallows of Sabang Bay to practice his buoyancy. The dive was exhausting as Mike had a hard time descending and staying down. It wasn’t because he was underweighted because we did a weight check at the surface where we found out he was overweight actually.

Later in the evening, Leahbeth invited Grace, Maziar, and I to her fiesta dinner in Sabang. The last time I’ve gone to a fiesta was in Panglao Island in May. Leahbeth’s house is perched on top of a hill in Sabang with a nice view of the bay. Inside, there’s an abundant amount of girly toy dolls littered around. When we arrived there were already about 10 people and they’ve all started eating. Leahbeth cooked most of the food and served it to us with lots of Red Horse beer. I’ve noticed I really only see Filipinos drink Red Horse at parties where their main reason is to get drunk. I rarely see anyone buy Red Horse at a bar or club.

Typical Filipino hangout—drinking Red Horse beer from a shared cup with ice, food, cell phones, and sitting around.

After dinner, we hung out with a group of Filipinos around a small table on their patio. It was the typical Filipino hangout and get drunk setup—there was food, cases of Red Horse, and one glass to share and drink the Red Horse. Someone would fill the glass halfway, put an ice cube in it, give it to someone to drink, refill it, and pass it to the next person. The more people there are the better because there’s more time between drinking.

The infamous Sabang nightlife.

Sometime later, some of the group wanted to leave and go to Village Disco while others just went home. Julio, Grace, Maziar, and I went to Village Disco. The disco was a little boring with the same girls, music, and bad dancing. I eventually made it home around 1 AM.


- jason