Dive, find jewels of the deep in Mindoro

Gregg Yan -

This tale is fraught with sharks and treasure, pirates and poachers, strife and solutions. Come, dive with me!

“Apo Reef is the ‘Jewel of Mindoro,’” former Sablayan Mayor Godofreido Mintu told me recently over a seafood dinner. “Perhaps you may come to realize just what its treasure is, but only after you dive.”

Having nursed a lifelong fascination with both pirate lore and bizarre quests, I felt the old man’s words strike home.

And now, surrounded by undersea life 65 feet below the eastern face of Apo Island in Occidental Mindoro, I pray to Poseidon and embark on a treasure hunt—a quest to find the true “jewels” of the deep.

I drift leisurely, propelled alongside a heavily encrusted sea wall by invisible ocean currents. My attention shifts to the wall, where neon-hued fairy basslets frolic amid the swaying tips of crimson gorgonians.

I peer in to inspect their knobby rows of polyps, careful not to touch anything, Leave No Trace principles being of primary importance.

A minute later, an impossibly huge school of yellow-dashed fusiliers (Pterocaesio randalli) appears. I try to estimate their number but they coalesce into a single mass that fills my vision end to end. In a moment they are gone.

This is truly Poseidon’s realm. Consider that 71 percent of the planet is covered in water, and 97 percent of that forms its vast oceans.

Covering just 1 percent of the ocean floor, coral reefs host an incredible variety of life: One in four marine creatures live within these undersea oases, and nowhere are these more beautiful and productive than in the wondrous Pacific archipelago known as the Philippines.

Apo Reef lies at the northern tip of the Coral Triangle, a 5.7-million-square-kilometer region that spans the seas of six countries—the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste.

A fourth of the world’s islands lie nestled within this exquisite region, distinguished by the presence of at least 500 species of reef-building coral.

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