Partial To Anda's Abracadabra

Do you believe in magic? STEVE WEINMAN finds that diving in a soon-to-bebetter-known part of the Philippines casts a spell both by night and day

- Steve Weinman

SO WE SIT ON THE WALL waiting for the sun to sink low enough, which it does at around 5.30, and slip into the water with that sense of gentle excitement that a night-dive never fails to induce, for me at least.

The creatures that come out by night are wasting no time. It’s like driving into a tunnel, and your satnav shifts to night mode. First to shuffle across the sand and settle on a broccoli coral is a mantis shrimp, followed by a red blob with horns and a yellow blob with eyes – the first a nudibranch, the second a juvenile boxfish.

Another juvi, a sweetlips, flip-flops uncontrollably from perch to perch as if intoxicated.

Soon it’s a free-for-all – hermit crabs in a variety of hard and some soft-shelled homes and a coconut octopus that, unusually, seems to be lacking one; and several sleepy-looking cuttlefish, but then they always look sleepy until they strike, as one of these does, at a passing morsel of supper.

There’s a pair of little red scorpion fish, and a much bigger tasselled one with its belly wedged tightly into a cradle-shaped coral. A fat red fish-head protrudes from the sand (still not sure what that was), and decorator crabs resemble pearly kings, dressed to impress after adding brightly coloured mineral fragments to their garb.

An hour passes, we’re completing a meandering circuit of the house-reef that has brought some exciting new character to light just about every other minute, and then there it is, the unexpected headline act – a blue-ringed octopus not thrilled to have been observed and fluctuating between cream and canary colouring, its rings growing more, then less distinct, like those targets in an optician’s eye-test.