Andy Moreno

My almost-step-son (wahey!) is seven years old and is just entering into the fantastic world of losing teeth. I clearly remember loving the feeling of wiggling a tooth with your tongue all day long, carefully eating food as to not break it off in an unplanned extraction.

We’ve made a deal that if I get to pull out his lose teeth then I’ll give him 100 peso, per tooth. If I just get to wiggle it around a bit and not actually pull it out he gets squat. He’s happy with the deal, and so am I! A few weeks ago we pulled out the first one and I’d say we are hours away from the second one…

Great weekend entertainment!

I grew up on a farm, and even though I did my best to move away from said dwelling as soon as I could I still lived there for almost twenty years. So I’ve certainly done my fair share of farm-related work, or at least been an unhappy bystander to all things that can (and usually) do go wrong on a farm. That of course include carpentry, plumbing and other similar DIY tasks.

So I consider myself to be an at least half-decent handyman. If my brother is reading this I believe he just had a small attack of uncontrollable laughter since he’s been in the way of my skills in the past. He’s certainly a much much better handyman than myself, but still, I’m not bad.

The problems I have with DIY over here is my complete lack of tools and the complete lack of intelligent staff in the local hardware shop. If an item is called widget and I ask for a wodget with included explanations and excited waving of arms I have zero chance of getting them to understand that I am, after all, trying to purchase a widget. They seem to have an almost aggressive lack of imagination when it comes to understanding what I mean. I’ve left that place in a huff more than just a few times…

I am so looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant-future when I will start building a house, I’m sure that me and the staff in the shop will have many memorable moments together, let the insanity ensue!

We’re 42 meters below a no longer visible surface, having followed the shot line through the murky water and about to enter a 66 year old wreck through the propeller shaft; a meter square clearance surrounded by jagged rusty metal. My heart is racing but I’m willing myself to relax to slow down my air consumption so my paltry 12 litre tank of nitrox will last to the end of the dive.

We arrived in Coron a few days ago and straight away went up to the Rock Steady dive centre and had a few beers with the owners Karin and Gerd. My buddy tried to convince the guide that we should go for the more advanced wreck straight away, but my lack of wreck experience decided that we would start with the slightly less hairy ones, which was ok with me!

Our first dive was on the Kogyo Maru, a Japanese auxiliary supply ship, we entered through the rearmost cargo hold and straight away found some bullets and even a 50 caliber artillery shell! Slowly navigating through the wreck, trying as hard as possible to not kick up silt in the face of my buddy behind me but apparently failing quite miserably on that account… One highpoint of the dive is advancing on the bulldozer that is still strapped into it’s final transportation spot.

After a nice long surface interval we slipped into the water again, this time our target was the Morazan Maru, an auxiliary cargo ship, one of the most popular wrecks in Coron due to it’s rich marine life and relatively easy level. We did some pretty impressive acrobatics to enter the shower rooms, still perfectly tiled up, and our guide told us after the dive that he used this wreck as a test to see if we were ready to go out on the one we were really looking forward to; the Irako, a refrigeration ship to transport food.

The Irako is probably the most interesting wreck in the area, dubbed by a very experienced Divemaster to Triple-D; deep, dark and dangerous. And we are just about to enter through one of the more advanced entrances. After following my buddy through the propeller shaft we end up in the transmission room and then weaving our way between the massive gear cogs still left in place. We then move into the Bottle Room while our guide waits outside due to very heavy silt and an easily confused exit route.

Throughout all the dives we keep disturbing great big shoals of trevally that create big silvery walls that move and reflect our torchlight, for every breath we exhale there is a very unnerving creaking noise from the bubbles escaping over the rusty metal and our guide having a loudly humming exhalation sound just adds to the great ominous feelings you get from these deep and dark wrecks.

The second dive on the Irako we go through an extremely confusing labyrinth of corridors and storage rooms and my admiration for our guide grows by every silted out meter we travel through. At least now I know that I have no issues with wreckdiving; I can take the narrow compartments quite well and my finning technique is getting better for each dive (the finning will need some serious improvement still though!), the only real issue is to improve my breathing consumption to make the dives last a bit longer…

Four very very cool dives on the wrecks of Coron complete!

Today I received a letter saying that it was time to pay the service charges to the council for my flat. Ok, quick visit at my online banking, set up a new standing order and Robert is your mother’s brother! Except that my bank card has expired so I can’t use my little calculator-like security device to log in.

Ok, clicking around the bank website, trying to figure out if there’s anything at all I can do before calling them and finding out that there is a new way to log into my banking that doesn’t require the security device! Except that I need to log in using my security device to activate it first.

So I call them and talk to a few nice people in India; first one couldn’t do anything at all, second one locked my online banking altogether and threatened me with some pretty hairy security questions to turn it back on, third one I can’t remember, fourth one was pretty good and figured out a solution, fifth one was actually an English person and was trying to authorise the solution from number four, sixth one told me to call back tomorrow after the fifth one failed the authorisation.

All I want is a new card, but the address that my bank has for me is a forwarding address and of course there’s no-one there to sign for the card delivery, so the cards that the bank has been trying to delivery (without notifying me, very nice of them) has all been sent back. Ok, so change the address to my Philippino one then! Hmm, no sir, you need to be registered for telephone banking for that. Ok, how do I get telephone banking? They will send me a passcode as a regular letter to my UK address, that will be forwarded to my Philippino address, I will use that passcode to change my registered address and then they will send my new card to me! Except I couldn’t get a telephone banking passcode because there was a link to a business account!?

I used to have a business account, it was closed down about ten years ago. The private banking section couldn’t send me the passcode because my private account is still linked to my business account. And they couldn’t remove the link since it’s to a business account. And the business banking section couldn’t remove the link since the business account was already closed! But the nice lady said that she could force a link-removal for me! Except it takes 24 hours so could I please call back tomorrow again?

So what I basically set out to do; pay my council service charges, looks like it’s minimum a month away after two letters have to be sent out here in the outback.

Hello arrears payment remarks.

We usually try to go out to have breakfast on Sundays and have so far been trying out different places in search for the best bread in the area. We still haven’t found a perfect place but the one we went to yesterday came pretty close.

There was just the slight issue with the dead person lying next to the pool that brought down the score a bit.

About 20 minutes before we arrived a few of the guests were swimming in the pool, one guy (apparently, no-one was really sure) dived into the pool, hit the bottom and, well… died. The information was a bit unclear, someone said he drowned, but when they tried to give him first aid blood was coming out of his nose and mouth and we were all pretty sure that doesn’t usually happen on a ‘regular’ drowning.

The body was lying on a sun-lounger with a sheet over it and his friend being consoled by the side. A pretty somber start of the day…

A schoolmate of my girlfriend’s younger sister (about 12 yo) was recently bitten by a dog, she went home and rested, got worse, and died in her bed a few days later. It feels wrong to accuse her parents of being ignorant when their daughter just passed away, but isn’t it fairly common knowledge that people with dog-bites should be checked for tetanus?

Now, don’t bad things usually come in three’s?!

I’m now back in Moalboal, nicely settling into a life that could easily become routine. When I left the area last year I really didn’t think I would be coming back here this soon, or possibly at all; I was planning to travel around Asia and dive everyplace I could find. How foolish of me to even attempt to make such a grand plan!

Instead my fantastic girlfriend Christy invaded my life and took over the show. So I’m now living with her and her two kids; four-year-old Yvonne and six-year-old CJ. Not at all what I was expecting, or could even imagine, but here I am, and very happy about it!

There are some teething problems, of course, the kids are mostly ok with me storming into their lives, but we do have some minor difficulties with attention seeking and whatnot. Which is to be expected, I think, and will surely sort itself out in due time.

Christy did a stellar job in finding our house, it’s a three-bedroom, all three rooms with small en-suite wet-rooms, very close to the school and just the right distance to her parents; close enough to easily to swing the kids over that way but far away enough to not have them on the doorstep all the time. One room for the kids, one for us and one for my ‘office’. Also a great outside area with a lovely breeze where we spend most of the time.

But I haven’t completely killed off my ‘travelling around Asia to dive’-plan, I’m way to stubborn to just forget about that, so once Christy is certified we will be going around the neighbouring islands to start with and then possibly further away. So I will basically be doing the same thing as planned, but now with a nice base and my constant buddy coming with me!

In the pool where I’m swimming there’s an old chap working in the locker rooms. His job is to mop up water. See, he’s got this squeegee mop, but randomly he also uses a broom and dustpan to scoop up bigger, more evil puddles of water!

Before you swim you have a shower, right, and drop water on his floors, then you return from the pool, dripping again, then have another shower, drip-drip, go sit in the steam room, shower, more dripping, and then finally you leave… The whole time he keeps shooting angry glances at you and follows you around with his mop/dustpan.

I think he really hates me, and all the other people who daily come and drip water on his floors. Or maybe he’s just a modern-day Sisyphus…

About six months ago I invested in a Patima housing for my Canon G10 together with an Inon Z-240 strobe, a major step up after my Canon Ixus with on-board flash. I’ve taken a few thousand shots with it now and have actually managed to get one or two decent pictures!

The camera itself is a beauty and the housing is nothing if not solid, possibly you could say that one of the draw-backs of the housing is the weight. A general problem with the camera is the scroll-wheel on the back, it’s used for a lot of menu settings but more importantly for pretty much all manual controls. I’ve seen several different solutions for scroll-wheels on underwater housings and I think the Patima is pretty sensible.

That is, when it’s not used with the supplied strap! The camera is delivered with a soft strap that you slide your hand in to and grip the camera in firing position, with your index finger on the shutter-lever. Like I said earlier the housing is pretty heavy and your hand does get tired after a while, and there’s an odd screw-pin-thing that digs quite heavily into your thumb. Also, with your hand in the strap it’s pretty complicated to turn the control for the scroll-wheel! Fine-tuning manual focus and then get your finger back on the shutter is not something I found to be completely easy.

I also got the Patima tray and single handle and as a complete contrast to the housing itself it’s quite flimsy and actually flexes from the weight of the housing when on land. Also I have to mention that the three supplied screws to attach the tray to the housing were too short and two of them came off during the first dive! So the whole handle situation has been something I haven’t been completely happy with and something I’ve been keeping constant look-out for to solve.

At the moment I’m staying a few months in Hong Kong, the haven of attachments and modifications! I’ve been trawling through the multiple dive-shops in search for the perfect replacement handles and even had a plan to manufacture my own. It’s also been my plan to visit the 10 Bar shop and earlier today I finally managed to get around to it. And my oh my, why didn’t I go there before?! I guess it isn’t quite right to call it a ‘shop’, it’s very much a warehouse and definitely a wet-dream-come-true for any underwater photographer, they have shelves upon shelves of every piece of kit you could imagine.

We had a little chat and looked at a few different options and I accidentally spotted this tray and baseplate and figured if there was any chance of drilling a few holes that it would work quite well… Now, I can’t claim to travel around the world with a power-drill and since I’d seen a very impressive-looking work-shop in the back I asked if there was any chance they could sort something out for me… Well, an hour and some pretty impressive modifications later I now present you with the ideal tray and handles for a Patima G10 housing! They even modified three screws to perfectly fit the newly modified base, no chance of these coming off.

As you can see it’s now fired with the thumb instead of index finger, and if you don’t happen to have ginormous thumbs you need to modify the shutter-lever, and look there, a slightly modified shutter-lever from some other housing perfectly attached! Another mega-win is that the scroll-wheel is now about 2cm away from your thumb when in firing position!

Altogether it came to around US$100 including work which I know is slightly more than the original Patima double tray but just trust me, this is quite a bit more sturdy. I can’t thank the fantastic staff at 10 Bar enough, solved all my issues in one sweet move!

Click on any of the photos above to see a few more shots of the housing and modifications.

I’m now starting to get into a good routine here; wake up around 10, faff around for a few hours, possibly start working, go swimming and then have lunch, start working properly around 3, dinner sometime around 8 and keep working until midnight. It suits me perfectly and I feel that I deliver my most efficient 8 hour day; I usually have a pretty hard time getting things done in the morning when I’m ‘at home’.

There’s a pretty nice pool and gym for our building and I go swimming pretty much every day. I got really excited about the outdoors 50m pool when I first arrived but luckily they closed it for winter during the first week I was here since it’s freezing cold in the water! Indoors if fine with me. Except that it does get a bit crowded sometimes, and most of the times it’s slightly older, slightly larger, ladies swimming in very un-straight lines. Think old car, can still be beautiful but takes some time to turn around. You have to keep an eye out all the time to avoid embarrassing collisions.

I’m on the 29th floor, there’s a total of 55. Well, minus any number that ends on 4, since that’s an unlucky number, obviously… And for some reason there’s two 27th…

We’ve got a few shopping malls in the base of the estate, then a big garden and swimming pools and stuff and the flats start counting on level 5.

The unlucky anything with 4th floor is interesting, some people take great care and count the actual floors in the building to make sure they don’t get a flat on the 44th floor! I guess the 47th floor in our building is actually the 44th, depending on how you count the mall and podium and whatnot… It’s a science!

There’s 8 flats per floor in our tower and 3 elevators and I’ve already ridden with other people from my floor several times, both up and down! I mean, the chance of coming or going at the same time as just 8 other flats is pretty small, no?

Or maybe the people living on our floor share a very basic… ehhh… whatever.