Diving in June

Sol, Timmy and Loida, Timmy's nanny, are going to Camiguin with me in June. We've got a full week and a half in Cagayan de Oro and Camiguin. We'll arrive in CDO, spend a few days arranging things for Timmy's Catholic baptism, and then go to Camiguin, spend a week or so enjoying the hot springs, the cold springs, the waterfall, and trying to dive every day :-).

I'm sure timmy will love the hot springs. I don't think we'll let him in the cold springs or the waterfall pool since the water there is very cold. But he'll enjoy looking at everything and will be wide-eyed for the whole week, I'm sure.

I had a LOT of dental work done over the last two and a half months and I'm a bit concerned about the diving. If there are holes in my porcelain caps (the adhesive wasn't smooth enough to remove all the holes) then I'm not going to be able to dive (the air in the holes expands as you dive deeper, creating pressure that results in nerve pain). I hope there are no problems. If there are, well, I suppose I'll have to make do with snorkelling from now on. I don't mind that too much. Diving is great, but having my next half-lifetime be dentally comfortable is a big deal too. I can deal with the compromise and maybe I'll just take up mounting climbing instead :-).

I'm really looking forward to diving Sunken Cemetery. That's a great dive spot a few hundred meters off from the Sunken Cemetery marker in Camiguin. I've dived there I think only once, and sol hasn't dived there yet. It's a great reef dive, not too deep (well, maybe there's a deep dive there, but I haven't done it since I wasn't deep dive qualified yet back then). I saw my second scorpionfish there (the first time was at the White Island dive sanctuary, a great coral garden and unfished reserve off White Island, that's a few hundred meters to the East (right) of that wikimapia spot.

White Island is sometimes named alphabet island since the shape is usually a "C", but sometimes changes with the season, wind and waves.

Sol and I have both dived off White Island (for our drift dive qualifying dive for the advanced open water certification) and we saw a HUGE grouper during that dive. It scared the heck out of me when it seemed to just suddenly become visible and then materialize somewhere else, it was so fast.

I don't think we'll be able to take pictures of fish that move that fast this time around, but we'll be able to take a lot of pictures when my sister sends the dive case for our camera over this month or next. We're certainly going to be taking a heck of a lot of pictures so that, finally, I'll have dive images to post rather than just describing dives and dive sites and posting links to wikimapia ;-).

Naturally, when we go over, we'll stay at CamiguinAction. We always dive with them (along with the occasional waterfall rapelling/canyoning. We love the resort too. I bought a bunch of pretty tropical windchimes for our bedroom so Timmy has something to look at, and I'll bring several over for the resort. We've got one of dolphins, but Timmy doesn't look at that as much as at the caterpillar/butterfly windchime set, so maybe we'll bring the dolphins chimes over and diggi can put that at the dive shop itself.

Timmy's baptism will be toward the end of the vacation, on 16June in Cagayan de Oro. I'm hoping that Josine will be able to come to the Philippines then, although that looks a bit less likely just now since the family is pitching in to help pay for my stepfather's emergency heart surgery in California.