SCUBA Diving in the Philippines - Subic Bay

A couple of weeks ago, our school had a 4-day weekend (to celebrate the Chinese "Mid-Autumn Festival"). For the first time in our marriage, Emily and I took separate vacations. It happened quite unintentionally. About 6 weeks ago, I was sitting in an in-service briefing, in which school administrators were discussing the details of starting school for the year. When teachers are pulled out of their classrooms and asked to pay attention to other grown-ups talk, we tend to act like teenagers. Thus, most of us spent those in-service hours looking at facebook, playing jokes on one another, and generally acting as immature as possible. Somewhere between iPhone scrabble games, one of the male teachers suggested a SCUBA diving trip to the Philippines. Within 2 hours, we had planned almost the whole thing (thus proving that we were both immature and extremely organized).

Emily doesn't dive. So, when I told her about the trip, she offered to let me go, and promptly began to plan her own "stay-cation" here in Hong Kong with some of the single ladies on staff. Thus, the "separate vacation" was born. I don't think we'll make a habit out of this, but it was definitely a fun weekend. Here's the photo essay of Brad's side of that vacation.


We (myself and 4 other male teachers) went to Subic Bay, Philippines. It's a couple of hours' drive from Manila, and is the location of a former US Navy base (now closed down). As the bay has been a focal point of naval activity for about a century, it has seen plenty of shipwrecks (some intentional, some unintentional). We had chosen Subic Bay for its wrecks, and here is one of my favorite: an old Japanese Patrol Boat from WWII. Here's me entering the Pilot House.


Here's a Spanish wreck from the late 19th Century (the "San Quintin"). The ship's pretty well broken up, but it's become a beautiful reef (some of the old boilers are still visible).



This is my favorite photo (above). It's a beautiful little Nudibranch that we came across on the San Quintin wreck. This little guy's about the size of my finger.
And a giant clam (above). Daniel (one of the other teachers) and I took turns poking it with our fingers.


Here's Daniel at the San Quintin:
And a beautiful Blue-Spotted Ray:
Here's an oyster shell I came across:
On one of our last dives, we decided to conduct a little experiment with compressed air. We took an empty plastic bottle (see below) down to about 50 or 60 feet and filled it with air from our regulators (the air you breathe at depth is pressurized to the same pressure as the water around you, meaning that you squeeze about 3 times as much air into your lungs at 60 feet as you do at the surface). Thus, the bottle below, once filled at depth, held triple the air that it would otherwise have held at the surface. Once we screwed on the cap and let it go, it shot to the surface. We listened for the inevitable explosion at the top, but couldn't quite hear it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the rules of diving, in order to allow your body to off-gas the nitrogen that you absorb at depth (from breathing all that super-compressed air), you have to spend time on the surface between dives. Hanging out on the surface between dives can be quite boring. It can also be a blast. The boat crew we went with was a very relaxed group of Filipino guys. They let us climb all over their boat and jump into the water.





It was a great 4 days - just what all of us high school teachers needed after a very tiring session at camp the week before. I'm not sure if I'd go back to Subic for another diving trip (the visibility was too unreliable), but I'm very glad I went on this trip.