My dive buddy from my Cuba trip, Karla and I planned a trip to Puerto Galera to go diving based on a trip that a Chicago crew was on but we couldn’t match up dates. We booked through Scandi Divers who booked us a private van and water taxi to the dive resort and greeted us when we arrived. I would highly recommend diving with them as they not only had amazing customer service from beginning to end, great diving and amazing staff that became friends!
Puerto Galera is situated on the Verde Passage, widely recognized as one of the most bio-diverse bodies of water on the planet! It contains more varieties of fish than the Red Sea, and more varieties of hard and soft corals than the Great Barrier Reef! The temperature averages around 29°C throughout the year and I rarely had to wear a wetsuit, and the visibility is excellent. We saw a lot of wrecks, caves, muck dives, shallow coral fields, Giant Clams, squid, nudibranch and drift dives.
Here is a video from some of our dives. I am shooting on a gopro so it isn’t the best quality. We had 13 dives including 3 to Verde island which was incredible.
I was able to attend Scandi Divers 1st ever blackwater dive that I got to experience with all of the dive masters and a few of the guests. We went to the Verde Island passage with two hundred meters of water below during the night. There were many comments of sharks and barracuda which was a wild thought as you wouldn’t be able to see them without shining your light directly on them.
You go down and take a safety stop 25 meters in the middle of the ocean with a bottom that is two hundred meters below you. You see the larval fish and the smallest juvenile fish of different species, tiny jellyfish, cuttlefish and many things I’ve never seen before. It felt like I was in outer space. I am not going to lie I was very apprehensive before going as it’s harder to have a buddy and you really need to rely on your own technical skills because it’s a huge drift and you need to maintain buoyancy so you don’t get too deep. You should be an advanced diver with 50+ dives before trying it. I highly recommend trying if you are a skilled diver. It was amazing!
Free to Wander 