The Weather is great!

The Weather is great here in Boracay! We got a little rain and wind from typhoon Man-yi but it cleared up nice. Rocky,Doug and Chad are out Diving the wreck and Fridays rock. Hopefully they will get that great after typhoon visibility! Its great to be back in the water again! Heres a pic of our shop today!

Diver pictures

Here is a picture taken by Daniel Ye! Hope to see you guys soon back in Boracay!

Maniguin 360 and video

Maningning Trip update

The trip was fantastic! First dive 30meter visibility, giant clams, stone fish and a huge school of surgons! Then lunch on the island with the locals who cooked us up some fresh Mahi-Mahi or dorado fish. Second dive we saw a napoleon wrasse, 2 giant cuttle fish and large jacks! A great dive! see the pictures on http://www.myspace.com/boracaydive

We are going back in two weeks!

Dive Safari to Maningning! March 16th

All the instructors are taking the morning off to go to Maningning (Maniguin) Island. Its the best diving in the Boracay Area. 40 meter visibility, Rays, Sharks, Napoleon Wrasses are common. We will do one dive and lunch on the island and Hike up to the Old light house built in 1909. after the luch and hike its back into the water for a another great dive. I will post more picture when we get back!

Giant Pregnant Pufferfish !

Today Svenya completed her Open water dive 4 a Crocodile Rock! We wanted to see the best soft coral in boracay and we did. The water was 27C degrees much warmer now and the vis about 15 meters! What a great day to be diving in Boracay! I have to say when Svenya did one of the most impressive mask removal and replacements I have ever seen, she had her mask of for about 2 minuets, because it got tangled in her hair! But she kept her cool and remained calm and cleared it no problem! Good work Svenya! A Giant pregnant puffer cruised by, it had to be a foot and a half long. We also saw pipefish and some large grouper! Total dive time 53 minuets , another great dive in paradise.-Dustin

Rescue Class

Another Rescue class is in the works here at Bluemango !
Today, Jay took his divers out to Angol to do the Paniced diver under water and unconcious diver underwater. I brought the video camera along to document the training. After the dive we reviewed the footage and made suggestions as to how the Rescues could have been better. Over all they did great job Simon and Erick!!

2 Octopi at Balinghai!

Mark, Doung and myself went out to Balinghai today on a mission to check out the artificial reefs.
The "reef balls" as they are called were put down March 2005 by the Boracay Scuba association. They are doing very well now with some soft and hard coral growth. Mark spotted a Octopus peeking it head out of one of the reef balls. I Looked inside myself and saw not one but 2 Octopi scrunched up next to each other on the ceiling of the reef ball! Cool!

Getting Wrecked in Boracay!

Day 2, of Serena's WRECK Specialty class on Boracays Camia wreck ! I put down some cave line for our wreck penetration dive just to demonstrate the skills required. Then It was her turn to put into practice the line laying techniques we tried back at the shop. She did great! No snagging the line and not much silting, good job Serena keep practicing! For divers who like wrecks the wreck specialty class Is a great way to develop skills and do 3 awesome wreck dives !-Dustin

Fruitless search for virgins, but it's all good

Now that I have your attention... heh heh... Rob, Joe & I went looking for Virgin Drop, a 20-40 meter site somewhere between the Camia and Friday's Rock. Well, we didn't quite find it until the end, but we had a fun dive none the less. There were lots and lots of nudibranchs today. The highlight, however, was a juvenile hawksbill turtle sleeping under a rock. It couldn't have been more than 1 year or 2 old.

Conditions today were great. The sun is out again and it is warm! We had flat water and light current. We could do with fewer jellyfish in the water, though! Total dive time was 39 minutes, maximum depth was 21.9 meters.

Mabuhay!

Busy week of training

We'd no sooner returned to lovely Boracay from our trip to Puerto Galera when Dave & Blanche arrived, ready to start their open water training. The class was an engagement gift from Dave to Blanche. My hat is off to these two. By the time that they were finished, both of them completed not only their open water certification, but also their advanced open water certification as well! All in about a week! We dove Angol Point, Lobster Rock, Friday's Rock, The Camia, a night dive on Friday's Rock and a rip roaring high voltage Channel Drift dive, just to name a few of the 10 dives (in addition to the training dives). Dave elected to do a photography adventure dive and took some really good pictures. That's a real challenge when you're brand new to the sport.

Along the way, I had some other guests as well: Ingrid from Queens -- we have a common friend in Rickie Cui, the head instructor at Mermaid Divers, one of our favorites shops in Sabang. I also got to know Jim from Oakland. Jim started out in the same open water class as Blanche & Dave, but finished on a different schedule. That's one of the advantages of training at Blue Mango Dive Center, we can custom tailor your dive experience to your individual needs. I also had the pleasure of teaching Tom & Nicole of Switzerland the Enriched Air Nitrox specialty. They learned how to extend their bottom time by using mixed gases. It's a surprisingly easy course to complete during your vacation. You can complete the classroom work in about half a day! Whew, I'm exhausted just writing about it all.

Maybe more later; there's a full-moon party at Red Pirates tonight. Gotta jet!

I found 500 Pesos

I was at Angol Point with Lee and Ms. Fong. It was a Great dive!!!!!! It was cool because the water was clear and my divers were comfortable. Ms Fong was a certified as scuba diver and was only diving for 4 months. She was very excited to be in the water. So excited she swam so fast. I tried to ask her to slow down but i think that she didn't know my sign for it. I was hanging on to her tank to slow her down a little for the other divers. Holding her hand only worked for a little while. While we were touring the reef, I spotted a piece of paper underwater that looked like money. I got Ms. Fong's attention and stopped her for a second. I went for the paper and to my surprise it was money!! 500 pesos. I really don't think anyone else would have noticed it, so I think it is safe to say that it was mine! Everyone agreed.

Yeah!!! Sunken Treasure!!!
Woohoooo!

I was doing Open Water Dive 2 with Keven at Angol Point 2. It is a new site for me because we just installed the buoy there. Kevin completed the skills effortlessly. After the skills we went to check out the site. It was great! It had more brilliantly colored corals then Angol 1. I thought the dive was excellent!
max depth was 7.6m
dive time was 31 minutes. Keven uses the average amount of air for a OW student.
water temp was 27C A bit cold for me. *snicker*

To everyone who reads this,
Happy Diving!

Angol 2 Rocks!

Larry and I checked out Boracays newest dive site Angol point 2 and It was awesome!
We were greeted at the site by a very large Mantis shrimp, which let us get unusually close to him. Larry and I headed west out to 3 horn rock as I call it where we saw a small yellow spotted trevally chasing down the small schools of silversides that populate angol. Oriental sweetlips/ many spotted sweet lips were also there at he new side, we never see those at the old Angol Point dive! Just when I thought the dive couldn't get any better a banded coral snake slithered thought the water in front of us, I looked back at Larry and he was smiling and flashing his ok, letting me know he was stoked to be on the dive! So for the first dive on this site I would rate it as a success

It was my new open water student diver Kevin and I on Open water dive 1 at Angol Point. I was kind of rainy, windy and cold, but we wanted to get in the water anyway. When I say cold the rest of you wouldn't think so. About 27 degrees C. Well we did some fish feeding and something strange happened. All of the fish spooked, bad! I looked around to see what might have spooked them. Nothing. We carried on and the fish came back. They spooked again. Now I was convinced that now something was chasing them. maybe a Jack or Barracuda. Something... I know it wasn't a shark. Anyway, we continued the dive and didn't see the "thing" that spooked the fish. Oh well. The rest of the dive was great!

New Dive site

As of January 1st Bluemango Divecenter was given the task of maintaining Boracays dive site buoys. As of today we have redone the Angol point buoy and the Camia East buoy. Our latest addition in the Angol Point 2 buoy, done today Jan 15, 2007. We put this one in because of the increasing popularity of Angol as a dive site, its common to see 4-6 boats tied up to the buoy during busy hours. This puts strain on the buoy line and, lets face it why crowd together its a huge ocean! The new Angol 2 buoy is cool, right when you get in if you head west you can check out 3 large rocks and the fish life is great! We will be upgrading the dive site with a chain later in the month. For now enjoy! -Dustin

Holiday Update

I've been on some killer dives the past couple of days and I'd
thought I'd share. The weather has been a little on the weird side,
some of it was remnants of Utor, then cloudy days. We had some days
with really thick plankton after the new moon. So, it was, well, like
I said, weird. Then on Christmas Day, things started looking up. I
took some new divers to Angol and the visibility was nice. We could
see critters again!

On the 26th we went to Baling Hai. Odd thing as the visibilty is
getting better, the water temp is dropping! Brrr. On the 26th we had
a totally killer dive on Yapak 2. The current was so good that we
drifted all the way to Yapak 3! Visibility at depth was 30m or more.
On the 27th we did a channel drift dive. Even at slack tide, we felt
like we were flying. Yesterday we dove on the Camia II. Again, the
water temp is colder than anyone remembers, but the viz was great!
20m or more. And no current or surge. It's great!

Balinghai Stingray encounter!

Hendrick and I headed to Balinhai last Thursday for a little deep dive action as part of his advanced class. While heading out to the wall we were greeted by a Mantis shrimp outside his den. Heading down the wall we spotted a 2 meter banded coral snake looking for unsuspecting fish in a small crevice on the reef. As we crossed the sand patch at 18-30 meters and got to the outer wall a Green sea turtle glided by us, at this point I had turned to Hendrick three times pointing and giving a the "shaka" which mean we are seeing cool stuff. Hendrick remember as part of his advanced class to notify me when 20 min was up, and his buoyancy and trim were spot on. As we started to cross the sand patch I noticed lots of disturbed silt and sand in the water which looked unnatural. That meant one thing, Huge stingray! Hendrick and I followed the sand cloud till it reached it thickest point and there it was, at least a two meter brown ray flapping its wings in the sand. It looked up and saw Hendrick and I and wanted nothing to do with us and gracefully glided away. At 70 Bar we called the dive and started our ascent to our first safety stop 9 meters and then to 6 m and 3m with a 1 min stop for each. Another great dive in Boracay! Good job Hendrick!

Photogenic shark.

Gina, and I went for a dive to Yapak. Yapak is a wall dive. The top of the wall is about 30meters and it drops to about 55m. When we descended onto the wall we were greeted by one of the resident sharks. It was a small White Tip Reef Shark, Just Chillin. It stayed with us for a while, keeping almost just out of sight. At one point, it looked like it stopped on the bottom just for us to take a picture. Our dive time was 26 minutes including the safety stop. Short but packed with lots to see.

Gettin dives in before the typhoon

I had a friend named Steve from Hawaii come out to dive with me. The weather was getting worse and the beach went from ripples to chop in the time it took to set up the gear. Our boat arrived and the boatmen loaded up our gear. It was kind of rough getting to the south end of the island but once we got into the channel the water calmed a bit. We were going with the waves and current until we were a bit leeward of the island. When we got to Crocodile Rock things were looking pretty good. We tied up to the mooring buoy and I jumped in the water to check the current. It was moving just a bit. We showed up just in time! I got out, geared up, did the safety check, then we both got in the water. Every time I go there I am reminded why Croc. Rock is my favorite site on Boracay! All we needed was just a bit of sun and the dive would have been perfect. There were brilliantly colored corals and fish all around. Bottom time was 55 min max depth was 20.1 meters.
After the dive we got on the boat and remembered that there is a storm coming. Back to the shop. The chop, out of the shelter of the island, was worse. We were forced to slow down to a crawl on the way to the Blue Mango beach front. It was rough but we made it.