Moalboal – Day 2: The Sardine Run
MOALBOAL
Day 2: The Sardine Run
October 25, 2024
Finally free from the clutches of Trami the tropical storm, I could make the most of my time in Moalboal, short though it would be.
Early in the morning, I found myself in front of yet another dive shop, ready to embark on yet another adventure. Joining me would be Alvaro, one of the Spanish backpackers I had met the previous day and whom I had managed to convince to dive with me. Having left his friends behind and ditched his plans for the day to do what I had suggested, you can imagine the pressure I felt before the dives!
Pescador Island
Our first dive would be at Pescador Island, a small, uninhabited island off the coast of Moalboal whose name nods to fishing traditions, though today it is better known as one of the area’s most famous marine sanctuaries.
The island is surrounded by steep coral walls that drop well beyond recreational depths, and here I got to see the most vibrant of coral gardens, with massive schools of sardines, turtles, frogfish, lionfish, nudibranchs and even a couple of whitetip reef sharks.
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A Living Galaxy
As cool as this dive was, it wasn’t exactly what I had travelled all this way for. Nope. It was, in fact, for my second dive: the wildly renowned Sardine Run. Having seen all kinds of cool sea life, one would think that a bunch of sardines would be somewhat boring. One would be gravely mistaken. Let’s just say this was one of my favourite dives ever, with Alvaro thanking me for having dragged him along.
The awe-inspiring natural spectacle that goes on right beneath the surface left me dazzled. Here, millions of tiny sardines form massive, shimmering bait balls that move in perfect synchrony, creating living clouds of silver that twist and pulse through the water. The sunlight scattered across the writhing fish, making me feel as if I were floating inside a living galaxy. Truly a surreal experience, and certainly worth all the hype.
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What made it even more surreal was how close to shore it all was. This wasn’t some remote, hard-to-reach dive site that required hours of planning and a dramatic expedition into the unknown. This was happening right there, just off the coast, beneath the same water people were casually swimming in a few metres away.
One second we’d be looking at blue emptiness, and the next, the entire world would darken as thousands upon thousands of sardines closed around us, splitting and reforming like a single living organism. I could hear nothing but my own bubbles, see nothing but silver, and for a few minutes, it genuinely felt as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
One Happy Ending
That evening, having decided to stay in a hostel to mix things up a bit, I headed to my dorm, where I was met by Eleonora and Marzia, a couple from Italy and Spain respectively, and Leonardo, an Italian influencer.
I have to admit that I bonded with Eleonora and Marzia over how weird this Leonardo guy was. With him being a travel influencer, he wanted to show all his followers all the crazy things he was doing, all while complaining non-stop behind the scenes. I swear I had never met such an eccentric person. He had us wondering why the hell he was doing it in the first place, given how miserable he seemed. Luckily for us, it was also mildly entertaining. At one point, he’d be filming himself walking down the street with the enthusiasm of a man living his absolute best life, only to stop the recording and immediately complain about the heat, the food, the lighting, the music, the Wi-Fi, the angle of the pavement and anything else that might bother a Celestian Dragon. Honestly, it was performance art at that point.
We decided to spend the evening together, the girls and I side-eyeing each other as Leonardo went on filming every single thing. After dinner, we took to the streets of Moalboal, endlessly wandering around. The village at night had a fun, slightly chaotic energy to it. Dive shops were closing up, restaurants were still full, scooters kept weaving through the narrow streets and every few metres there seemed to be another bar, another tour stand or another sign promising turtles, sardines, waterfalls, canyoneering or some other adventure I no longer had time to squeeze in.
Luckily for us, we did have some time at our disposal – something we realised when we came across a massage parlour that was too tempting to resist. While everyone was busy enjoying their normal massage, I went for the bougie option of having a four-handed massage, something I had never tried nor even heard of before then. And lemme just say, if you think being massaged by one massage therapist feels like heaven, being massaged by two of them is purely transcendental. I didn’t know my body could achieve such levels of ecstasy. And before your mind starts to wander, no, it did not, in fact, feature a happy ending. Well, not in the euphemistic sense, at least.