DIVE DAY THREE: APO ISLAND ADVENTURE

Chapel Point

Anyone who dives can tell you he or she lives to hear that sound.

It's the quick, repetitive clanging of metal against metal, usually a long, thin rod or a caribeener against an aluminum tank -- your dive guide has just found something really cool and is alerting you to drop everything you're doing and quickly head over to what he or she has found.

We're in a small cave opening, where a school of glassy sweepers is shimmering and swimming and we're well past the impressive drop-off at a wall where we began the dive.

Could it be, I wonder?

My heart quickens as dive guide Kim Zudero gestures with his metallic pointer in one hand and contracts the thumb and index finger of his right hand. It's the signal for "eel" and as I follow his lead I'm rewarded with a face-to-face encounter with an elusive creature -- a ribbon eel (top left). At once, the eel is longer, thinner, stunningly brighter and impossibly smaller than the images I've only seen in magazine pages.

And the eel isn't shying away as other divers start showing up around me, eager as I am for this photo opportunity. It's body is a bright blue bordering on purple, with tinges of yellow. It rises from the sand within the cave stretching its body upward, contracting its mouth. After getting some face time, I head on, peering in every crevice of the wall of coral, trying to spy on other small life.

When you find something small and unusual like this eel, here at a site named for the nearby chapel on shore, it's as if you're on an underwater Easter egg hunt. So again, I'm excited to find yet another nudibranch and I also see a different colored sea star than the bright blue ones so common in the Philippines. Again, the corals are striking in structure, color and variety.

And as I've been showcasing photos of the friends I've made on the trip, this time (above) it's fellow NABS members Annette Myers, of Houston and Steven Miller of Amityville, New York.

Dive Buddies: Ernie, Doc, Jim, Annette, Mike, Brittney, Rick, Eric, Steven, Paul, George
Dive Guide: Kim Zudero
Max depth: 57 feet
Total Bottom Time: 62 minutes
Water temperature: 82 degrees Farenheit
Exposure Protection: 3mm shorty wetsuit
Air source: Enriched Air Nitrox 32% oxygen
Photos Copyright Gil Griffin 2009. Clockwise from top: ribbon eel in cave; sea star; coral formations; Steven Miller, Annete Myers; nudibranch.