Back to Malapascua

I am about to head back to Malapascua, a small island on the northern tip of Cebu in the Philippines, a lovely place, a tiny low oceanic island in the middle of the Visayan sea. Most of Malapascua is sand, and its highest point rises only about 20 meters above sea level. I first visited Mala in 2009, and have lots of good memories associated with the island …. Even though tourism has caused the island to transition from a sleepy place with a few dive shops into a fairly busy, hipp tourist destination, there are still magic moments to be had, watching the sun go down in a flamboyant spectacle of all imaginable red and orange hues. And the diving is a blast there, too!

I did most of my technical diving training in Malapascua with Matt Reed at Evolution Diving, and I highly value the skills and mindsets I picked up there to this day. I also ran a fun photo and marine bio workshop at Evolution in 2012-2014. This is a blog post I wrote for Evolution some time ago about gobies in Malapascua, and a pot I wrote about the changing ecosystem in the sandy planes right in front of Mala’s “Bounty Beach”.

Check out this album on Flickr with some of my best photographs from Malapascua: The thresher sharks feature prominently, of course:

During the next two weeks, I will contribute to People and the Sea, a great environmental NGO in Malapascua which concentrates on marine life surveys and outreach activities. The NGO also established a successful home-stay program on the island, and runs a composting initiative, to make sure a lot of the organic waste is turned into soil (good soil is a rare commodity on a sandy island!).

In 2017 the “Peopseas” and I conducted an interesting research project about decorator urchins, sea urchins with the unique behavior of covering their body surfaces with select marine debris. This video explains more about this project:

This clip tells the story of a survey which we did on the northern tip of Cebu proper, across from Malapascua.

Happy diving everyone!