Philippine Siren
Philippine Siren is a classic boat where its crew keeps it in shape. The leisure area and our room were very spacious. The dive prep area is a little tight in space, but they run a very efficient operation and literally take care of everything for you so you don't have to run here and there to grab your camera, fins, etc. When it's dive time, practically every crew member comes to the dive deck to prep for you. Once you step into your wetsuit, you practically don't have to do anything else. They will remember every piece of your gear to bring to the zodiac, along with your favorite drink once you come out. I've taught my wife to be self sufficent, including setting up the gear to taking the nitrox measurement. I feel that they have spoiled her here. The crew really goes out of the way. My wife had a quacker that stopped quacking. I borrowed a tool from a crew member and opened it up to see what is wrong to no avail. I thought that's the end of her quacking on this trip. But later on, the crew member disassembled it and got it working without my asking.
The food is great, with a change of theme every day. Every meal was provided, and they were full meals, from lunch on day of arrival to dinner on the last night and breakfast on the last day. The automated cappuccino machine is awesome, nothing like a quadruple shot before the morning dive.
Every dive site is different, unlike some other liveaboards, and each location they take you to is completely different from the others that you visited, from reef, wall, cavern right through an island, sardine, whale shark, thresher to muck. It's like going to many destinations on one trip. Some people said they could have done all this via land based diving, but it's a lot of traveling by land and sea to get to each of these dive sites. The guides were great, they would point out to so many things that we would have definitely missed. Gotta give a shout out to Jonah, who glee with excitement on her finds and made sure everybody got to see them, even though it's probably the 1000th time she has seen it. I thought the muck dive would be OK but it would definitely not be for my wife, but she loved it because things were just crawling around everywhere. We were kind of disappointed that we only got a limited sighting of the thresher shark, even though we had the advantage of dive extremely early and getting there first. I guess the fact that people show up with all their bubbles causes the sharks to leave. We did make a second attempt the next day with the same result, although my insistence on getting a good sighting caused me to stay back for an extra few minutes, thereby missing the humongous jellyfish that everybody else saw. We also got a visit from Dr Frogfish to give us a presentation on all the varieties out there, and believe me, this place is filled with frogfish.
I thought the fish variety was great, but another diver said the fish life is not like what it used to be when she visited 10 years ago. I was expecting worse, hearing how the lack of enforcement have allowed the locals to clean out the reefs. We did hear a couple of loud bangs from a distance while underwater. We thought it was someone doing dynamite fishing far away, but was told it was the local diveboat's engine misfiring.....I still have my doubts.
At the end, they even provided an extremely detailed daily dive log with every fish they saw, accurately identified. I see the cruise director and DM flipping through the fish ID book for hours in order to identify the exact fish that were seen.
It was great that they provided pickup and dropoff service to anywhere in the city area, plus their boarding was quite early compared to other liveaboards, so we don't have to be stuck hours in limbo between the time after checking out of our hotel and being picked up.
