Day 286: Scuba Day

As noted before, Sabang is a scuba diving village and we had no original plans to go diving. We tried to get PADI certified in March 2020 and after finishing the course, the world shut down. Thought Why Not, and picked Octopus Dive shop and got prepped for our Discovery Dive.

A Discovery Dive is an option where the shops give you a crash course to teach you the basics and then take you out to open water if you are ready. We both have some dive experience, through Discovery Dives at other locations.

The shop figured out we completed coursework, and gave us the quick crash course; out at the reefs within 45 minutes and the immediately had us dive down.

We’ll admit Sabang is legit. All around are massive fields of coral, some that are accessible right off the shoreline. They have dive sites with a lot of variability, a lot of ship wrecked sits, and some as deep as 40-50m. We dove at "Dungeon Wall" and notably saw a school of barracuda, a massive tiger prawn, another sea turtle, and several large sea clams. Mary was amazed by the endless amount of unique and colorful coral. After the dive, the instructors complimented our diving skills and told us that normally, they need to teach their students in the pool first, something they skipped for us.

We had a relaxed afternoon after our dive. It's easy to understand why dive culture feels like a true vacation: dive in the morning, nap after lunch, and head out to happy hour. Sabang has a lot of Japanese and Korean visitors, which leads to a lot of those influences in the town. We got our favorite Korean pot stickers and ramen from the local grocery story and cooked lunch at home. We used some of this time to continue planning for the rest of the trip.

Now to be clear, the typhoon off the coast has started to make us imparts known. Around 5pm, we decided to walk around Sabang. We had mostly seen the main street so we walked to a nearby cove, about 30 minutes away. Note how all the boats from the previous two days are gone and rain is up. Attached pictures of how this changed. The dive shop owner admitted that the boats off the island would stop running so we are stuck here for now.

On our way back, we stopped at a Happy Hour spot for some margaritas and then got the pizza that Kieran had been craving since Japan.

The plan for the rest of the night was to watch Attack on Titan. The typhoon brought intermittent power and wifi outages. We broke up these outages with some lizard catching and cards. Czytaj więcej