October 2010    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 25, No. 10   What's this?

Atlantis Azores, Philippines

fantastic liveaboard but only fair diving at Tubbataha Reef, El Galleon good

from the October, 2010 issue of Undercurrent  

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Dear Fellow Diver:

When the captain opened the dive deck of the 107-footlong Atlantis Azores, it was time to see whether diving on the remote Tubbataha Reef would live up to its billing. After our 12-hour, open ocean steam from Puerto Princesa, we had anchored for the night on the southern end of the North atoll. Scott, our boyish, stocky American captain, explained that this would provide more shelter than the South atoll from the prevailing winds and chop. It was time to dive.

I’d chosen this itinerary because of the promise it held to see lots of big stuff. There wasn’t a lot of information to be found on Tubbataha before I booked the trip. No entries in Undercurrent(I should have seen that as a warning), but glowing reviews on TripAdvisor.com, in Asian Diver and a website called “Dive Happy” described squadrons of sharks, jacks and possibly manta rays. So after backrolling off the skiff with the five other divers on board, I descended down the steep wall known as Amos (AH-moce) looking for that big stuff. Well, there was big stuff all right, but not what I was hoping for. Huge sea fans and even larger barrel sponges sprang from the wall but their effect was diminished by the sparseness of healthy corals and large fields of dead, broken, branching coral. It looked like a monochrome beige ghost town. “Well,” I thought, “it’s a check-out dive, so chalk it up.”

But dive two, on another section of Amos, was much the same: big sponges and coral, with the addition of small numbers of typical Pacific denizens like Moorish Idols, butterflyfish and triggerfish, and more fields of broken corals. By the time I surfaced after our third dive (we did four to five dives a day), from a site called Wall Street, I was concerned. You guessed it: fields of dead corals. I did spot a couple of small white-tip sharks but not the thriving schools I’d expected. I posed next to a few sponges for staff photographer Randy, but because I’d taken plenty of sponge and fan shots already and there was not a single anemone fish to capture on my Nikon, I was frustrated.

Dive four, at Southpark, sent me into near depression. The only diversion was an eagle ray off in the blue. Back on the skiff, when our divemaster, Jess, asked the typical “Good dive?” I answered, “Nope. I have to be honest, I’m pretty disappointed.” Jess just looked down at his feet. ...