Equipment Problems and Sharks

Mantis shrimp coming out of his home.

Caroline’s dive equipment was left at my place and so she picked them in the morning. I made breakfast for both of us—oatmeal and coffee. After breakfast, we did a morning dive at 9 AM to “Shark Cave” with Matt and Jerry, a guest from Manila.

Caroline at the end of a concerning dive.

At the dive site, we descended to 75 feet where Caroline signaled to me her regulator was breathing irregularly. She noted her alternate air source was breathing irregularly also. I was concerned and remained close to her as much as I could during the dive in case she needed to use my alternate air source. Equipment failure is rare, but does happen.

Later in the dive, I noticed that my strobe on my camera randomly flashed by itself. This is usually a sign of my strobe being flooded. It made it hard to take pictures. This problem coupled with Caroline’s regulator made the dive less fun. We did see a white tip shark though in a cave, but it was too far in to take a good picture. Corals were nice and colorful too and I found a nice mantis shrimp.

At the surface, Caroline had a technician at Asia Divers look at her regulator while I frantically tried to figure out what was wrong with my strobe. Matt was kind enough to wait for me to figure out what was wrong with my strobe before our next dive. I looked online at several websites and support groups but couldn’t find anyone with a similar problem. I unscrewed a few ports in my strobe to have them dry out in case there was moisture in any of them. Eventually, my strobe seemed fine. Caroline’s regulator problem was that the diaphragm was folded over.

Ornate ghost pipefish hiding in a feather star.

Cluster of xenia coral.

The second dive went much more smoothly than the first. Caroline’s regulator worked fine and surprisingly my strobe didn’t flash on its own. Additionally, we dived at the “Hills” which is one of my favorite dive sites out in Puerto Galera. There, we got to see two frogfish, several interesting nudibranchs, and an ornate ghost pipefish. During the dive, I focused on learning how to adjust my strobe, aperture, and shutter speed of my camera to get different effects. I was looking for the best settings to isolate and light a foreground object while having a dark black background.

Feather duster bunch.

Devil scorpionfish almost walking along bottom.

Flying nudibranch in current after Maziar kicked it up. It did eventually land.

Afterwards, Caroline, Maziar, Matt and I hung around El Galleon and ate lunch. Unfortunately Matt had to leave for Manila by 4 PM. In the late evening, I ate dinner with Caroline at Toko’s at Atlantis resort. I had pasta which was good and surprisingly not as expensive as I thought it would be. Toko’s bar has the fanciest espresso machines I’ve seen out here in the Philippines. I analyzed one of the workers make an espresso from it; not bad, but, his grind needed to be finer and he needed to tamp harder. I’m such a coffee geek.

After dinner, Caroline and I had a few drinks at the Point bar and then we watched Sharkwater on my laptop. It’s sad to see how sharks are being killed so inhumanely for just their fins. 100 million sharks are killed a year because of ignorance, corruption, and money. Most of the finning occurs from Asian countries especially in China. I’ve talked to several divers about how often they see sharks now versus before; they always say it wasn’t what it used to be like, there were a lot more before.

Being aware of this previously, I no longer eat any shark dishes.


- jason