Blog Time!

A couple nights ago I managed to hop onto a night dive with Chris to the nearby deep wreck called Alma Jane. I've been there at least 7 times during the day but this was my first time at night. The boat searched around for a minute before finding the tiny marker buoy of a few plastic jugs tied to a rope. Upon dropping in, Chris and I battled the ripping current to make it to the buoy but after pulling ourselves down the line about 24 meters, the water was still, which set the scene for the eeriness of the dive. Unlike typical night dives, there was actually very little activity happening while we were there. It seemed as if all the nocturnal creatures either took a night off or went somewhere else. We were surrounded by complete darkness broken only by our two single beams from our dive lights. Floating through the inside of the large boat, the familiar beams and passages came into view in bits and pieces as the lights panned around. I can't explain how eery it was to see the wreck one beam of light at a time with almost no life at all. It's something I suggest all of my readers try to experience one time in your life.

The 19th of September was the Project AWARE International Cleanup Day where divers around the globe join in to help clean our marine environment. Due to a scheduling hitch, Mindoro participated in the cleanup yesterday instead. About 79 divers from at least a dozen dive resorts in the area came together to pick up trash in the water outside a boat yard across the channel from an elementary school. While all of us stuffed sacks with rubbish and fought our way to bring the heavy loads to the surface, the elementary students combed the beach for any sort of trash they could find. To give a bit of an idea: I was underwater for only 20 minutes before my large rice sack was so full that I struggled to surface and hand it to the nearest boat. What's worse is the amount of garbage I passed that was either covered in coral or too large to put in my bag. Tires, bottles, paint cans, clothes, bags, scrap metal, glass, plastic, toilets, hangers, and so much more junk covered the bottom that I was like a kid in a candy store grabbing everything in sight and stuffing it into my bag as if someone was going to take it from me. I reckon we could repeat the cleanup every day for a week and still not pick up everything that was in the water.

On a happier note, last night was a totally legitimate cooking on my own experience. There is a market a couple hundred yards from the center of Sabang. Rickety tables are stacked with very shallow plastic bins filled with an array of fish (virtually none of which have seen a knife), all sizes of prawns, mussels, clams, pork, pigs feet, and every part of a chicken you can imagine. This tiny market is contained almost entirely in one narrow and short alley sheltered by very low hanging plastic to protect from rain and sun while forcing me to stoop as I walk through. It's the kind of market that is very difficult to find if you don't know what you're looking for. For this reason, it seems to be tourist-proof and thus the prices are more fit for the Filipino population. That being said, I have a blog update brewing about how much racism goes on here, but in a completely different way than back home.

Anyway, yesterday I prowled through the selection of fish hoping to find tuna. I had to change my plan when I discovered that the tuna that day were too smart to fall for the free food dangling on a hook trick. I ended up settling for an enormous portion of blue marlin for about $2.50 though if I knew better how to scale, gut, and clean fish then I would have made a different decision. With the leftover change, I ventured further down to the end of the alley where the tables ended and I found a couple guys selling produce (and other small food products) nestled in the corner. I bought a bottle of soy sauce, two eggs, fresh ginger, a clove of garlic, and a small pouch of calamansi (local citrus more flavorful than lemon but the size of a cherry) all for less than a dollar. After picking up salt and pepper I made my way back to my room to begin preparing a wonderful meal of fish, mashed potatoes, and cucumber. I'm still working on my improvised cooking skills so I had to take the easy way out for the vegetable.

Forty five minutes, a big mess, and one broken spatula later, I sat down in my plastic chair at my collapsible dinner table and looked down at my soft steamy mashed potatoes with fresh garlic, pan-cooked marlin with fresh ginger and calamansi sprinkled with salt and pepper, a nice piece of cucumber, and a cold glass of grape juice to top it all off. I ate silently in the company of mediocre television programming and before I knew it all that remained of the fish were the bones and lingering smell. Cleaning up my dishes, I felt very proud of myself for making something that didn't involve noodles or rice. Not only that, but none of my food came out of a package. I'm starting to think that I've come up with a dinner option that I will be using quite frequently in the month to come, and I think I'm going to be making some new friends at the local market.

There is either a tropical storm or typhoon named Ondo ravaging the northern part of the Philippines and we are feeling the effects here on Mindoro. Today marks the third day in over a month and a half that I have not gone on a dive. The water is so rough that a boat flipped over earlier today right in front of the beach.