I’ve been living the last three months in a dream. The kind of day dream where you are living on a desert island, with nothing to worry about except when the tropical rains next arrive on your doorstep, or will the boat bring any chocolate back from the mainland? My island is in Taytay bay, Palawan, the last frontier of the Philippines. The only other inhabitants are the staff and volunteers of the Coral Cay expedition that uses Cagdanao Island as its base.

If you can imagine a place so remote that it takes three days to travel there and involves a total of eighteen hours on three planes, a nine hour bus journey along rough, dirt tracks and a two hour boat trip over clear blue sea. Two hotels, a trip to the immigration office and endless rainforest scenery. On this island I spent a summer diving coral reefs and sunbathing, and it is an experience I will never forget.

The Expedition Base

The expedition base was set up and run by Coral Cay Conservation and has been running since early spring 1999. It has been made possible by the Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation, part of the World Land Trust. The expedition is surveying the reefs of Taytay bay to try and determine the state of the reefs and to provide evidence needed for the protection of the reefs against destructive fishing methods.

Cagdanao is a small island and the base is set in to the forest at one end of the islands long beach. ‘Home was a solid wooden building sleeping 38 people, and a similar building minus the walls, used for everything and anything other than sleeping. We also have a smaller staff sleeping cabana, a toilet/shower/sink block, a tool shed, store room and medical room. Slightly separated from the main area are the compressors, the shack for the scuba kit and the home of the Filipinos who help run the site.

Quite a nice size base for the normal field force of twenty-five people. Slightly more crowded when we have a full house of forty-five.

The Diving

Having learnt in Britain, off the south coast, and never having dived in clear blue seas before, I had an idealistic view of what the diving would be like. This being mostly influenced by TV and holiday brochures, I was expecting 40m viz, bright, vivid colours and large fish everywhere I looked. My first dive was, maybe surprisingly, a bit of a disappointment. The viz was more like 15m due to the wind and storms of the rainy season, and the bright colours were more like muted tones of reds, browns and greens. I was right about the fish everywhere, but unfortunately fish all tend to look the same to the inexperienced eye, so they all blurred into one multi-coloured, lesser spotted, wotsit fish.

However, after the rigourous training known as science week, I became an expert at identifying common indo-pacific corals, fish species and invertebrates. After this every dive was a discovery of something new, a fish that I’d learnt from the books and never seen before, a new nudibranch or flatworm, a patch of reef completely free of dynamite or fishing damage. Blue and yellow or sailfin snappers, dash-and-dot goat fish, honeyhead damsels, parrot fish, wrasse, batfish, moorish idols, sweetlips, groupers, jacks and trevallies, squirrel fish and soldier fish, angel fish, butterfly fish, moray eels, blue spotted stingrays, black tip reef sharks, nurse sharks and turtles. I could go on forever, but the true diversity of the Sulu sea has not yet been discovered, making the work we were doing all the more important.