Twin Lagoon

Next stop on the tour was the dive to the Sunken Japanese wreck which I don’t have a photo of since I don’t have an underwater camera (advice to those planning to go to Coron, you gotta have an underwater camera with you, even if just the cheap disposable ones). So I’ll be moving ahead to the Twin Lagoon which was our almost last stop for the day.

Again, I was expecting a cove where we might get to relax a bit but it turned out that not unlike Siete Picados there ain’t no sandy beach to land on here too.

Pardon my ignorance, but I really don’t know the proper definition of a Lagoon, so here’s something from Wikipedia; a lagoon is a body of shallow sea water separated from the sea by some form of barrier.

Alrighty, so now that we got that out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

As its name suggests, the Twin Lagoon is composed of two lagoons, an outer lagoon where we docked and an inner one, where one has to pass through a cavelike entrance either by swimming or rafting during low tides or by diving under or climbing a ladder above during high tides. It was said that accidents do happen while diving under so better be careful. Lucky us the tide was ebbing down during our visit.

We disembarked from our boat, transferred to the bamboo rafts provided by the caretakers and as soon as everything’s in order (i.e., our cameras), we soon paddled towards the inner lagoon.

There were a couple of visitors in the area but they were already leaving so we mostly had the lagoons to ourselves. The sun was already low in the horizon and we can definitely feel that dusk would soon encroach these parts.

The water was deep green in color and it was eerily quiet. We can hear nothing but the sound of our paddle hitting the water. The sun’s ray bouncing off the limestone cliffs surrounding the lagoon had that very late afternoon look and it only heightened the sense of unnaturality of the place.

I was actually having second thoughts snorkeling but what the hell, right?

Swimming at the twin lagoon only got my stomach on a knot even more. The water here was strange, very strange. One moment the water’s cold, and the next warm; I turn my head left, the water was crystal clear and when I turn right, everything turns blurry like the water’s filled with oil (but it’s not oily at all).

With no other snorkelers in the area, my mind was zoning in on the realms of the X-Files. Told you I don’t like snorkeling alone, what more on a strange lagoon.
After circling the area for some minutes, I finally got my head out of the water and found that our raft was gone. My stomach was turning a few notches tighter.

With a sigh of relief, it turned out that our boatman was just disposing a huge jellyfish that was found in the area.

I at length had enough of it and finally boarded our raft and paddled back to our boat.

I was relaying everything I experienced to our boatman and he did confirm everything I experienced, I wasn’t going bonkers after all haha. He said that some locals (or was it divers, sorry got everything mixed up) tagged the lagoon’s water as strange water due to its peculiar properties. I asked if there was some sort of explanation regarding the water suddenly turning oily like that but even our boatman doesn’t know why that was.

That was one strange swim.