Saturday, October 08, 2005

DIVE DIVE DIVE - Siquijor Delivers!

SIQUIJOR DIVE SITES
Diving around the Island of Siquijor is excellent. There are however sites to the south that might require a lot of experience because of currents. BEST CHECK locally with QUALIFIED dive people before venturing out. Safe diving is your responsibility.

Paliton: Flat reef top (4 to 6m), with nice hard corals and ribbon eels, then a wall.
Sanctuary: This Marine Sanctuary has great hard and soft corals but not many fish.

Lala-o Sunken Island: 10 minute boat ride west of Coco Grove Resort. An underwater island that slopes down from 10 to 40m. Schools of fish, sometimes the manta, lots of sea snakes and turtles.

Shipwreck: Slope. The wreck of a Japanese landing craft lies at 25 to 35m. It is covered with corals and many lionfish live here. Moray eels and frogfish can be discovered.

Salagdoong: A gradual slope from large semi-submerged rocks, that gets steeper around the 20m mark. It has good coral cover with a variety of cabbage, pipe, staghorn and other hard corals, lots of tunicates, soft corals, crinolds, some blue spotted rays, morays and turtles.

Candapino Point: Coral gardens from 7 to 18m with sandy patches. Sometimes a large school of batfish, jacks, rainbow runners, sweetlips and lots of anthias.

Tambisan: Is a great dive with schools of smaller fish, some large gorgonians clinging to the wall, colonies of green tubastrea, black corals and hundreds of invertebrates. There are also several small cavelets and crevices populated by sweepers and soldier fish. The reef top, above 10m is home to lots of anemones.

Tongo Point: The reef top has fields of leather corals, slowly drops and is covered with masses of soft corals with lots of colourful fire hydroids. Further down are crevices and overhands populated by surgeon fish, Moorish idols and a profusion of tiny reef fishes.

Safe Diving all!

A Special thanks to Teresa Zubi who compiled the Dive information.