Puerto Galera
In Puerto Galera, specifically the resorts on La Laguna Bay and the town of Sabang, Happy Hour is in the late afternoon. The problem with Happy Hour is that participation in the festivities means that you, dear diver, are NOT doing the night dive. And if you are not doing the night dive in PG, you are missing out. The bars don't close immediately after Happy Hour, they continue to serve patrons even after the night dives are complete. The beer and mixed drinks are still cheap, just not 2-for-1 like during Happy Hour. But they taste so much better later ... since you have another PG night dive to talk about.
A dinky blue ring octopus dragging a mollusk back home for dinner, tiny octopus hiding in the sand, bobtail squid watching divers watch them. Ghost pipefish of all varieties out hunting. Mollusks, some small and some huge, motoring around the sand, looking for dinner. An assortment of pleurobranchs and nighttime nudibranchs and flatworms, some nudis imitating flatworms while some flatworms do their best to look like a nudibranch. Demon stingers and stargazers. A near-overload of critters to find and observe. And this wasn't even your best night dive at Puerto Galera! That was at The Hill, or maybe Sabang Bay, or the Boatyard, or it could have been on St. Cristopher wreck or Coral Cove. You can't remember .... because you've enjoyed every PG Happy Hour underwater.
PG diving is mostly muck and rubble and coral heads, but with a surprising number of beautiful reefs or small wrecks thrown in just to keep you guessing. You spent so much time at the bottom of Manila Channel, probing the coral rubble or looking over the tugboat wreck for dragonets and nudibranchs and frogfish, that your dive computer nearly shrieked out an alarm. You headed up the side of the channel to do a long safety stop, and found a stunning coral reef waiting for you. Wait a minute, I thought this dive was supposed to be in coral rubble! Ah, that was your "dive", this is your safety stop. Enjoy the crinoid with a squat lobster underneath, crinoid shrimp and clingfish inside, and an ornate ghost pipefish hiding in the fronds.
While in PG, don't miss an opportunity to dive on Verde Island. It's a journey, a long-ish 45 minutes in a speedboat out to Verde, but you'll realize why you're there within 5 minutes of getting in. Clear blue water, a gorgeous reef
covered with hundreds of types of coral and crinoids of every color, fish, fish, and more fish. Soak it in. And if you're
so inclined, stick your face down in the reef and find some nudibranchs that you haven't seen before, even in the muck back in PG.
Water temps at PG dive sites are in the low to mid 80s Fahrenheit (or 28 to 30 C), in April and in September. Air temps? It was in the upper 80s in the afternoons. Currents are generally mild, but you will whip around one corner at Verde Island, and The Canyons dive site will give you some big fish action due to the currents there, and diving Manila Channel at the wrong time will be a workout. Usually, you will be in little to no current, searching for every macro critter you can find. Getting to PG from Manila requires a 3 hour ride in a van to Batangas, and a one-hour boat ride to the island in mostly sheltered waters.
The resorts in Sabang/La Laguna Bay area have access to Sabang, which is a big enough town to have a large collection of shops and restaurants and markets and drinking establishments. So if you need some sort of uncommon battery for your dive computer, or to visit a cigar shop for a celebratory smoke, or you need some mangosteens for a snack, or get a 10 meter long banner made to alert everyone that your dive buddy's 50th birthday is today (Curt, ydw), you can get it in Sabang.
Diving in Puerto Galera has something for everyone. Some nice wide angle sites, some small wrecks, some pretty reefs. The most satisfied diver will be the one who wants to look for the small and strange, on a sandy, mucky, rubble-strewn, or seagrass-covered bottom, or in between the coral heads. Go slow, look around carefully, and maybe you'll be the next PG diver to have a blue ring octopus swim in over your left arm, flashing like crazy, and land on the coral head right in front of you .... to mate with the other blue ring octopus you didn't even notice was there.
