By: Marty Snyderman, Atlantis Photography Ambassador
Tubbataha: What More Can I Say?
I made my first trip to the Sulu Sea and the reefs of Tubbataha roughly 35 years ago. I can still recall several encounters with manta rays, gray and whitetip reef sharks, a swim with a tiger shark, schools of bigeye jacks (aka bigeye trevally) and barracudas, and reefs that teemed with colorful tropical fishes, sea fans, spectacularly colorful soft corals, and hard corals galore.
No doubt about it, as a budding underwater photographer, the reefs and the associated marine life provided some wonderful subject matter for my library. But looking back, due to my relative inexperience as a world dive traveler, I was probably guilty of not appreciating my good fortune as much as I should have.
In the years since that trip I have explored tropical reef communities around the world from the Caribbean to the Coral Triangle. While I can’t claim to have dived everywhere, I now know that I have been extremely fortunate to have dived a lot of the more popular destinations that scuba diving has to offer. I am well aware that many reefs around the world are degraded for a variety of reasons, and over the course of my career I have come to accept the fact that the natural world is diminished to varying degrees depending on where one goes.
And then there is Tubbataha.
The reefs and ecosystems of Tubbataha are as close to pristine as any place I have seen in a long, long time. What a joy to see coral reef communities that are like the ones I used to see. The coral cover is astonishing, and everywhere I swam on all of the dive sites we visited, I found myself having to make choices about what to photograph. The mix of healthy hard corals and sheer walls adorned with a rainbow of soft corals provided subject matter and negative space that photographers dream of. But in the waters of Tubbataha, you don’t have to dream. You just need to dive and look around.
Favorite moments from this trip included whale shark sightings, a close encounter with a manta ray, being engulfed by schools of bigeye jacks and blackfin (aka blacktail) barracuda, a swim with roughly a dozen somewhat curious/somewhat wary, juvenile gray reef sharks, a number of up close-and-personal encounters with green and hawksbill turtles, and opportunity after opportunity to watch and photograph a variety of fishes getting cleaned. Listing animals I encountered and photographed doesn’t do my experience justice. I’d go back to Tubbataha in a heartbeat, and I’d be 100% satisfied if I didn’t see a single creature I did not seen on this recent trip as I found it so uplifting to enjoy a protected World Heritage Site where the world is as I remember it to have been.
All that said, I sure was glad to spend a week diving at Atlantis Dumaguete and then Puerto Galera following my Tubbataha trip. The diving in those destinations is completely different then at Tubbataha, but it is different in a wonderful way. And now that I am home, I am already looking forward to going back to Atlantis Dumaguete in December. Lucky me!
View more of Marty Snyderman’s photos at MartySnyderman.com.
Learn more about diving Tubbataha on the Atlantis AZORES Liveaboard.
