San Pablo Island

Today’s plan was to drive down to San Pedro Island for the day and spend night. Jordan’s and Jordy showed up around 8:30. The goal was 8 but the car had a low tire so that needed to be fixed before we could leave.

We drank coffee before we left and Mayette made sandwiches for the road for breakfast. Ford needed to stop at his office for a minute so after that we hit the road heading south. We stopped at a nice travel plaza type place north of Aboyog and then Jordan turned the keys over to me. I got to try the horn and the lights and swerving around people and passing motors and tricycles and trucks and meeting speeding vans and dodging dogs and driving a underpowered car through the mountains! We did a short detour through Aboyog where Jordan’s family lived back in the day.

We got to Canipaan around noon and ran to the market for fried chicken for lunch then loaded our stuff in the boat and rode to the island. It was about a 30 minute ride.

The west side of the island is set up for visitors, but it is not commercialized at all. They have bamboo and coco lumber huts built along the beach and also some built out over the water with docks leading out to them. The huts are something like 12′ by 12′ with benches around the outsides and most have a table in the middle. They also have lofts built in them that can be used for sleeping with either plywood or bamboo floors. The huts over the water also have diving boards.

The beach is white sand with small coral pieces, to the point where you see lots more coral than sand. I can hear the waves washing in now while I’m typing and can hear the coral rolling in the water on the beach.

We unloaded our things into one of the beach huts and ate lunch. After lunch we grabbed the snorkel gear and headed out to see what the bottom looked like. Unfortunately, there was not much to see but we swam a long time anyways. The water was very calm beings we were on the lee side of the island. Outside the hut was a 15′ diving board that we used. And we walked down the beach and tried the boards out at the other cabins and maybe got a little hard on one. Ask Brent. The diving boards were great because the bottom dropped off very steep about 30 or 40 yards out.

It gave us a great view of Leyte also. It was cloudy most of the day and sprinkled a bit here and there and the clouds were low over the mountains with some haze and it was beautiful.

After dark we moved to these huts.

This was to be our night spot, between these two huts.

There is no restaurant on the island so the others got someone to cook a little for us. There used to be fish available but not anymore. We had supper and told stories a while and watched the crabs crawl across the deck by where we’ll be sleeping and looked at fish underwater with a flashlight. The lights go off at 10 when the generator shuts off and Jordan was feeling cruddy with a little bit of a fever so we turned in early.

My bed is one of the benches so I’ll be sleeping with only a few slats of bamboo between me and the ocean!