Verde Island expedition

In the middle of the strait between the main island, Luzon and Mindoro, there is an island called Verde. It is supposed to be the best of the best of diving in the area and among the best diving in the world according to… well, I don’t know who it was.
Big Apple had organized a day trip out there, bringing the chef as well as food and beer, so while we were diving the chef was preparing lunch for us, great! Too bad for those people sitting in the Big Apple restaurant that day, only microwaved food for them, haha

The dive master today was Troy, the Australian guy with a temper. He was giving a briefing as if we were going on some military mission. "Stay behind me, don’t do anything I did not ok, etc." It is getting a little old and kind of ruins the joy a little bit.

The diving was actually a little away from the island itself. Some huge atolls reached from the bottom and up to be just below the surface, only visible in low tide. This created some strong currents and caused the nutrition from far below to come to the surface, where fish were having a feast.

I don’t know if it was just me, but the best diving? What do they mean by that? I honestly didn’t think it was much different from the other diving we had done along the coast of Sabang Beach. There were a lot of fishes, much more than any of the other places.
There was a huge sea-fan, the biggest I have ever seen. The current was quite strong, so when sticking the head around an edge, you felt the drag in the mask and a feeling of being sucked into the current. But to call it the best, not sure I agree. Actually pretty sure I don't

We had two dives with an hour surface interval between, where people were sharing stories about almost anything. Suddenly one of the guys shouts that my camera is leaking black liquid, oil maybe… What? How can it be leaking anything???
I check the camera, but the black color is coming from one of the strobes. The evening before, we had been drinking maybe 1 beer too many, and when I got back to the room in the middle of the night, I changed batteries to charge.
To not lose any parts, I put the batteries in the strobe and put on the lid.
Apparently I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing, and the o-ring had been squeezed and had not been keeping the battery compartment dry. I opened it up and there was the batteries sizzling happy away in the saltwater. I poured out the water and poured some fresh water in instead, to clean the batteries and cool down the strobe which was quite hot.

The new super powerful rechargeable energizer batteries were toast, they were all crisp, not sure how hot they had been. I cleaned the battery compartment as good as I could, filled it up with freshwater to keep it moist until we got back where I could clean it in the evening. Luckily the Sea and Sea strobes have an isolated battery compartment, so even though it floods, it is not going to kill the entire strobe. At least that was my hope, but I had to wait and see when we got back.

After the 2^nd dive, we went to the island where food and cold beer was waiting. It was pretty good food and since we now had the first beer at noon, why not just call it a day and keep partying the night away.

We did a pretty intense effort to try and empty the entire cooler for beer before we would be back at The Big Apple, but I am sorry to say that we failed. Still don’t understand why, because we surely made a run for the money.

Back at the hotel again, Martin went shopping for a new mask. Meanwhile I cleaned and dried the strobe and tested it out with fresh batteries. Yeah, it still worked, which I thought we had to celebrate with a beer or two in the bar.
When he came back with his new mask, Naven asked if he could have Martin's old one. Martin's problem was that his huge nose didn’t fit in the mask, but Naven’s argument was that his nose was small enough and would fit, haha. He was happy, we were thirsty, guess where we ended up?