Late News: Black Pearl...New Boat launched at Dugong Dive Center in Palawan, Philippines
Late NEWS from the Dugong Dive
Center
in Palawan, Philippines.

Black Pearl from the Dugong Dive
Center
in Palawan, Philippines
Our latest new Boat the "Black Pearl"
has been launched yesterday and is ready for all your Diving
adventures. The “Black Pearl” has a capacity for
16 divers, ideal for groups and adventure excursions in Palawan.
Overnight trips to the world famous Coron Wrecks & Apo Reef for
8 divers. Like our
other big Boats the Tashina and Karen Claire it has high quality
standards and a Compressor on board.
Discover amazing Palawan with the "Black Pearl" operated by
the
Dugong
Dive Center on
Club Paradise.

Dive the Philippines: Apo Reef is the second largest contiguous coral reef in the world, scuba diving at its best.
Did You
Know...
Apo Reef is the second largest contiguous
coral reef in the world and the largest one in the Philippines.
The
Apo Reef
Natural Park
consists of the three islands.
Apo Reef is the largest among the three islands.
Apo Reef Natural Park (check this
link for more info on APO Reef)compared to that of Tubbataha National
Marine Park has a unique natural phenomenon. Apo Reef has a high
diversity of corals and has an island covered with terrestrial
vegetation.

© Gunther
Deichmann - Apo Reef Philippines...a Scuba
Divers Dream
and a heaven for Underwater Photographers.
The Apo Reef Natural Park, with more than
20 dive sites, will truly fascinate you with its magnificent walls
and large fish species. The reef plateau will surely impress divers
and snorkeler alike.
Only 3 hours by banca from the Dugong Dive Center and
Club Paradise Apo Reef offers very dramatic drop-offs
down to about 400m. The steep walls are well covered with corals,
sponges, tunicates, nudibranchs and slugs.
The coral formation at the plateau is magnificent. Green and
hawksbill turtles, sharks, Eagle Rays and a multitude of fish
including damselfish, butterfly fish, batfish, surgeonfish,
snappers, fusiliers and trevallies are common.
Kids Sea Camp (KSC) the very first to be held in Palau, sponsors including PADI, SPORT DIVER MAGAZINE, SCUBAPRO and DAN. 2009
Latest News and info on the Kids Sea Camp
PALAU 2009!
Please
follow the links below for the latest updates on the very first
Kids Sea Camp (KSC) to be held in Palau.
Sam's Tours is the host
tour operator for Kids Sea Camp Palau with accommodations provided by
Palau Royal
Resort. The program is limited
to 50 persons on this inaugural year.
Kids Sea Camp is an award winning educational program for children
and is supported by major sponsors including PADI, SPORT DIVER MAGAZINE,
SCUBAPRO and DAN.

KSC is a
very important and prestigious event for Palau and one that Sam's
Tours should be very proud to have been selected to host. Top dive
destinations go to great lengths and compete heavily to be selected
as KSC destinations and it is no small feat to have been chosen as
a KSC destination. Other KSC host destinations include Grand
Bahama, Grand Cayman, Bonaire, Curacao, Costa Rica, Galapagos,
Roatan, Fiji, and now finally PALAU!
More information is forthcoming and in the meantime, please visit
the URL's below and familiarize yourself with Kids Sea Camp PALAU
2009 and start speading the word!
http://www.kidsseacamp.com/
http://kidsseacamp.com/palau/palauhomepage.html
http://kidsseacamp.com/palau/palaudivesams.html
http://kidsseacamp.com/palau/palauresort.html
Dermot Keane,
GM Sam’s Tours Palau
Breaking NEWS! Baby Buzz... at Dugong Dive Center... reported from last few days… more Baby Dugong sightings and Turtle hatching on this small Paradise Island in Palawan, Philippines
Baby
Buzz...on a Paradise Island!
It
is now the Turtle nesting and hatching season at
Club Paradise and Dugong Dive
Center, but not only
Turtles…more sightings of Dugongs and a young
calf.
Received from
Dirk Fahrenbach - all Photos on this Blog post have been taken only
two days ago,
thanks for sharing these amazing past few days with
us.

© Courtesy of the Dugong Dive
Center -
only hatched a few days ago, Hawksbill Turtles at Club
Paradise,
Palawan, Philippines
Club Paradise is certainly the place in Palawan, Philippines for
nature lovers, where else can you see Dugongs during the Day with
the Eco friendly staff at the Dugong Dive
Center who’s
conducting the Dugong watching. The same day, later in the evening
stoll down to the waters edge and watch Turtle Hatchlings making
their way into the Ocean.
Unspoiled Nature at its very best!
Dimakya Island, the Home of Club Paradise, is also a Turtle
Island…
Every Year Green and Hawksbill Turtles come on shore and lay the
eggs just in front of the guest cottages.
The nesting and the hatching is at night, you can walk careful
along the beach with a cold beer and watch nature takes its course
it doesn’t get any better.
© Courtesy of the Dugong Dive Center - taken
measurements
on a newly hatched Hawksbill Turtle.
The
Dugong Dive Center Team put up a fence around the nest’s to
make sure that monitor lizard and other predators can’t reach
the eggs. On the day the hatchlings crawl out of the sand, the
staff gives them a helping hand, protecting and safeguarding these
young Turtles until they reach the waters edge.. we release about
25% the same night, the remaining ones are then taken to a small
pool until the shell get stronger for their release approx. 30 days
later in small groups.

©
Courtesy of the Dugong Dive Center - Rolf Winkelhausen
from the Dugong Dive Center inspecting some Turtle
eggs.
Guiding
these small hatchlings to the water is important not only to
protect them from would be predators but they can get disorientated
due to the lights from the Resort Building.
The Club Paradise House Reef has a small portion with sea grass on
either side and this is where the adult green turtles are residents
and can be seen on almost every dive. A food source for Turtles and
Dugongs alike, right in front of your accommodation, just a stone
through away.
Our ecotourism program is “Dugong watching”. Dugongs
can be seen in the general area even if they are not at the House
Reef at the time. In the last two-month resort guests have seen
them several times, a mother dugong and its baby. A Dugong gives
birth to a single calf only, it is born approx. 1 m in length
during birth, the calf then spends two years with its mother and
receives the milk from underneath the flippers.
©
Courtesy of the Dugong Dive Center - This amazing shot was taken by
Marvin Alvarez from the Dugong Dive Center, a guest ask him to take
a few shots while snorkeling, he past the Camera to Marvin who then
took the shot for the guest.
Dugongs are vegetarian and need to eat 25 kg of sea grass per day,
hence the reason for been regular visitors at the
Club Paradise House
Reef.
Surveys over the last few years (from ultra light plane and
helicopter) spotted between 19 and 24 dugongs in the near vicinity
of Club Paradise and in the Bay area.
For our more serious Divers, diving the famous Coron
Wrecks or a dive trip
to the World famous Apo
Reef is a must and
should be on any Divers agenda.
Report by Dirk Fahrenbach
and GD
Breaking News: Tigers, Silvertips and Reef sharks at a new Dive site…read the first hand report.
From Shark Fins and dead Sharks to very much life ones in Chuuk, Micronesia and to be honest I like it like this much better. They have been cruising the Oceans for Million of years and still today and that is just so nice. I have just received this report from our Alliance Partner in Truk Lagoon (Chuuk) I briefly mention this a couple of weeks ago the discovery of this new Dive site in the Truk Lagoon.
From what I have read now I have to say, Wow! Fantastic! But then I am not that hot after a while diving the Wrecks anyway, this news is super cool, you certainly have the best of both worlds now.
Please read on what Kelvin Davidson and his wife, Anabel wrote, both are employed by the Truk Stop Dive Center which is a PADI Resort plus a IANTD and TDI facility…& a member of the Philippine-Micronesia Alliance. The Divers Choice!
Thanks to Kelvin and Anbel for sharing this with us.
GD

© Gunther Deichmann - A very
frisky Reef-shark. Could this be Truk Lagoon? This shot was taken
on a different location in Palau, but according to this report Truk
has got now some great action too.
…OK, so every scuba diver knows that Truk Lagoon is the
worlds premiere wreck diving destination. And yes, more than 60
WWII wrecks were sunk during the 1944 Operation Hailstone and all
are accessible to the scuba diver. Most people familiar with Truk
Lagoon also know that we have more than 100 miles of surrounding
outer reef which has gone basically untouched because the big draw
in Truk Lagoon are the wrecks.
Well, the folks at the Truk Lagoon Dive Center are changing this
mind set that Truk is only for wreck diving. They have been
exploring the reefs off the wrecks and learned these areas are BIG
FISH territory, with the bluest water imaginable and visibility
that is often 60m/200-ft.
Students of history may recall rumors that the Japanese Navy would
lay anti-submarine nets across the openings in the lagoon reef to
dissuade allied forces from sneaking inside the lagoon. The Truk
Lagoon Dive Center staff found one of these recently and it just
happened to be anchored to a most magnificent seamount.
Currently going by the imaginative name of “Seamount No.
1”, this special place is just a 35 minute boat ride from the
Truk Stop Hotel dock. Seamount No 1 is a circular plateau several
hundred feet across and rising from the bottom of the lagoon at
60m/200ft all the way up to about 6m/20ft.
While a mixture of graduated steps, steep walls, and deep fissures
make the site topographically interesting, what really makes this
site special is the sea life it attracts. We dove this site about 4
times now and we always see huge schools of surgeonfish fighting
for space with dark clouds of midnight snappers. Skipjack and large
yellow fin tuna hunt side by side while swarms of big eye trivially
engulf the passing diver.
Solitary bump head parrotfish and Napoleon wrasse graze the reef
while man-sized dogtooth tuna cruise casually by, but it’s
the sharks that keep bringing us back to this site time after time.
White tip, black tip and grey reef sharks abound in the shallow
waters while big 3m/10ft silvertip’s swim below 20m/60ft.
These are big fish, not your typical reef shark, but rather
heavyweights of the ocean and you can certainly feel their
presence.
Inquisitive by nature, silver tips will repetitively pass very
close to you (making the casual diver quite nervous but thrills the
underwater photographer) and are found here in unusually large
numbers with the occasional leopard shark basking on a sandy
ledge.
But the real thrill is the Tiger shark, huge Tiger sharks that have
been seen here on several occasions. Tiger sharks are perhaps the
most graceful and magnificent of the apex predators in the ocean
and move in such a relaxed manner, without a care in world and
oblivious to everything that is not consider food to them –
turtles are food to them and there is a lot of food around.
So, if you’re in Truk Lagoon and your “lust for
rust” has been quelled or you just want a mid-week break, get
out and see what very few people have every seen – some of
the worlds best reef and walling diving and right in the middle of
Truk Lagoon.
Late News: Dugong Dive Center & the NEW and very sexy TASHINA...explore and island hopping to APO REEF NATURE PARK or CORON BAY with its Wrecks from WW II or TARA ISLANDS plus a lot more in Palawan, Philippines
Island hopping at
its best...explore Palawan and beyond.
She has
arrived...and ready for some serious island hopping in Palawan
Philippines.
we have just gotten word that the very “SEXY TASHINA”
is now at Club Paradise and Dugong Dive Center.
Dirk Fahrenbach dropped these images of yesterday, now he is on the
way with Juergen Warnke from Club Paradise to the Shanghai Dive
Expo.

Dugong
Dive Center Info...”The
Tashina”
As of
September one the Dugong Dive Center has the brand new Yacht
“TASHINA” (Trimaran).
The Fiberglas Yacht is 16m long and equipped with a back up
engine.
For daily dive trips the boat has a capacity of maximum 10 divers
and for overnight trips a maximum of 6 divers.
The boat is ideal for private charter. Guest that like to have a
private boat with dive guide and boat crew will have an individual
dive cruise, they never forget.


You like
to go as couple with a yacht across the Calamian Islands of
northern Palawan? This is only on sample of individual
cruising.
Trips to APO REEF NATURAL PARK or CORON BAY with its Wrecks from WW
II or TARA ISLANDS are the 3 main destinations we still offer with
our Dive Boat “Karen Claire”. This 12 years experience
with those dive trips will benefit the trips with our new
boat.
For more info contact: Club Paradise and Dugong Dive Center
@
http://www.dugongdivecenter.com/
http://www.clubparadisepalawan.com/


Data Sheet
(“Bust and
waistline”)
200 HP Main Engine
40 HP back up Engine
Bauer Compressor
Deep/Fish Finder
GPS
Satellite Telephone
Simple Kitchen
Small Toilet with Fresh Water Shower
Open Air Shower / Fresh Water
Diving Platform
12 and 220 V
TV with DVD Player and SD Card Slot
Radio with JBL and Bose Marine Speaker
One Open Air Sitting Area with Table and Sun Roof
One Cabin Sitting Area with Table
One Double Bed
4 Single Beds.
6 Open Air Hammocks for sleeping under the Stars.
Published Rates:
120,-Euro per person per day. (min. 4 Guest)
Inclusions: Accommodation, Food, 4 Dives per day.
OR
Boat Charter
100,-Euro Boat Charter per Day
30,-Euro per hour Travelling (fuel charge)
Per Person:
50,-Euro / Day Diving per person
15,-Euro per person for 3 meals


