Homeless Diver

A guy lost on Boracay

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I went on one of my drunken snorkeling trips that begins with 10am RedBull/vodka and ends with sunburn. On the way back, I found some huge cuttlefish pretty near the shore. Normally, I would never tell anyone where I saw these (when its so close to shore), but only a few will know what I’m talking about anyway… lets start at the beginning:

From the shop, I kicked out past the parking lane.. as in really far out, about a kilometer. Most of the passing boats were between me and the shore, hell I might have been further. It still wasn’t really deep, I think 8 meters max and I free-dove a lot out there in a sea urchin graveyard but tons of living urchins eating up the algae.  It seemed that they all had mouth parts pointed upwards in an orange ring like the lips of a blow-up doll. The beach area sucked with all the extended algae bloom and even the boat-parking area had a good deal of greenery (from a swimmers POV).

On the way back, Mango rock seemed pretty shabby and dead – it never really recovered from getting flipped in Typhoon Frank. I kept kicking shoreward and noticing other than the usual algae bloom, there was a lot of large seaweed planted in the sand. I’ve never seen it like that here.

Halfway from rock and shore was a small garden of seaweed at 1.5 meter…. nothing interesting except the shoreward side had really long stalks almost touching the surface. I was just about to go down and pull one up to see how it was anchored and— whoops, there was a black & blue banded sea krait (snake). It was about a meter long and just poking around in the green mush that was gathering at the stalk bases.

Out of the corner, I saw them. 4 cuttlefish. then another 4. A total of 8 cuttlefish in 2 groups were picking at tiny fish that were crowding in the seaweed garden. Almost transparent but getting brown when they neared the bottom— they were HUGE! (by my standards anyway). The smallest one was  1 ft long (30 cm). The 5 largest were about 3 ft long (1 meter) with a barrel diameter of half a foot (15 cm).

To me, thats HUGE! They let me get within a few meters but shied away when I moved or got too close by drift (tide was going out) they skitted off. I even chased after them a few times and they came right back when I stilled.

There’s only been one sea animal I wanted to chill with since I was a kid and now I did. Here on Boracay, free diving off the beach. Friggin almost as long as my body— SWEEEETTTT!

2 Responses

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1. 

   McCawFF

   sweeet sounds like you had a good day.

   Apr 1, 2009 at 6:02 AM

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2. 

   Chad

   Dude, biggest one I saw was at Crocodile with Gaz a few times at 7 meters deep. It was about 3 ft long. I got it on video changing colors on us. Pretty awesome. You gotta sneak up on them at their level or lower.

   Raining on them from above like you were doing….. I can only picture. Grab some dive gear and a buoy and get some pics!

   Mar 29, 2009 at 1:49 PM

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