Dive Review of Turtle Bay in
Philippines/Moalboal, Cebu

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Turtle Bay, Mar, 2011, by Kimberley Fox/Michael O'Reilly, AP, US ( Reviewer 5 reports with 6 Helpful votes). Report 5991.
No photos available at this time
Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Accommodations		Food
Service and Attitude		Environmental Sensitivity
Dive Operation		Shore Diving
Snorkeling
Overall Rating
Value for $$
Beginners
Advanced
Comments	A three-hour drive from the Cebu airport, Turtle Bay is one of several dive resorts on Moalboal. Owned by the pleasant Brit/Filippina couple Chris and Fe, the resort has accomodation for up to 50 people. Standard schedule includes a two tank morning dive; destination alternates between nearby tiny Pescador Island and multiple sites (mostly wall dives) on Moalboal's coast. Pescador is about 30 minutes by boat. The Moalboal sites are all within 15 minutes or so. Pescador's signature attraction is a large school of swarming sardines, around which barracuda and hunting jacks are often found. Divers can swim through parting clouds of sardines to appreciate the swarm up close. Thresher sharks and whale sharks are rarely seen here. Threshers apparently made routine appearances at Pescador until about two years ago. Aside from the sardines, Pescador has an interesting variety of frogfish and scorpionfish and an occasional octopus. At the Moalboal sites over the course of a week we saw about 10 orangutang crabs on bubble coral, a variety of scorpionfish including several species of leaf scorpionfish and probably 100 common pipefish (no ghost pipefish.) There is a nearby mandarin fish dive, but the site is very small and the resort tries to limit the mandarin dives to only two divers. Our best dive may have been a night dive at Moalboal Bay - very shallow - where we saw octopus, many species of translucent shrimp, a sargassum file fish, unusual decorator crabs and an eel-tailed catfish. Afternoon dives are available, though sometimes only shore dives on the house reef. This is not a bad reef, but it's not so interesting that you will want to do it every day. The boats used at Turtle Bay, of the bangka type common in this region, have little shade; no space dedicated to cameras; at low tide divers are shuttled to and from the pier by a smaller motor boat. The bangka felt crowded with 12 divers on board for Pescador trips. Guide quality is highly variable. Although the corals seem healthy, the overall volume and diversity of marine life is much lower than anywhere else we've been in the Philippines. This may be due to the abundance of local fishermen line fishing at many of the dive sites. On the last trip to Pescador I counted 13 fishermen's bangkas lined up nose to nose with dive boats. Apparently the locals have abandoned net fishing, but they are politically powerful and no protection of the reefs from line fishing is imminent. The impact on the reefs is clear: almost none of the larger reef fish were spooted by us during a week of diving. Another factor may be in play here, however, as we saw few nudibranchs in our dives here, very unusual for the Philippines.
Websites	Turtle Bay
Reporter and Travel
Dive Experience	501-1000 dives
Where else diving	Bunaken, Lembeh, Wakatobi, Sippadan, Indonesian Borneo, GBR, South Australia, PNG, Tanzania, Philippines many locations, Little Caymen, Belize, Turks and Caicos
Closest Airport		Getting There
Dive Conditions
Weather	cloudy	Seas	choppy
Water Temp	27-28°C / 81-82°F	Wetsuit Thickness	3
Water Visibility	12-16 M / 39-52 Ft
Dive Policy
Dive own profile	no
Enforced diving restrictions	60 minute duration (irregularly enforced)
Liveaboard?	no	Nitrox Available?	yes
What I Saw
Sharks	None	Mantas	None
Dolphins	None	Whale Sharks	None
Turtles	> 2	Whales	None
Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):
Corals		Tropical Fish
Small Critters		Large Fish
Large Pelagics	N/A
Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Subject Matter		Boat Facilities
Overall rating for UWP's		Shore Facilities
UW Photo Comments	Boat has no clean water dedicated to cameras. Camera rinse tank at dive hut not always clean.

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Dive Review of Turtle Bay in Philippines/Moalboal, Cebu

Turtle Bay, Mar, 2011,

Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Overall Rating

Reporter and Travel

Dive Conditions

Dive Policy

What I Saw

Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):

Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Dive Review of Turtle Bay in
Philippines/Moalboal, Cebu