On the flight to Manila to meet Corey all I could think about was the Wendy's hamburger I was going to have when I got there.

Unfortunately the Wendy's betrayed me and I was stricken with stabbing stomach cramps at around 2 a.m., eight hours into what has to be the worst overnight bus ride of my life.

Luckily a few tests from the local hospital and some antibiotics took care of the problem, and the next day I was feeling shipshape and on a pump boat to take the photos of the San Miguel marine sanctuary.

Mt. Mayon, a perfectly cone shaped and active volcano looms on the horizon over San Miguel island. It is one of the few perfect cone volcanoes in the world and is the symbolic land mark for the region.

The residents of San Miguel are mostly fishermen and go out daily in their small bangka boats to catch their food.

Each pump boat is brightly painted by its owner. This is the gunwale of one of the wooden boats beached at San Miguel Island.

There are lots of dogs roaming around the island.

Lex and Dave from Bicol University's Tobaco campus came with Corey and I to point out the best spots for photos within the San Miguel sanctuary reef.

Giant clams are thriving inside the sanctuary.This photo ran in the August 22nd Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

This nudibranch was a slowly moving photo subject.

I think if I had gotten any closer, this puffer fish would have attacked or maybe deployed his puffing mechanism!

Almost like the Beatles' Yellow Submarines.

A closeup of a sea cucumber slurping up stuff with its appendages.

The variegated spikes of this sea urchin say....stay back!!! This photo ran in the August 22nd Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Inside the sanctuary the corals were healthy and reef fish were doing well...

...but outside the marine sanctuary a dynamite blast flattened a school of fish and left them dead on the silty sea floor like scattered coins glinting in the sun.

It didn't take long for the dynamite fishermen to come back to collect their illegal booty.

They also use this technique on the Jerry Springer show.

We've nicknamed this fellow "Gollum".

A stick of dynamite, a few handfuls of dead fish makes a pretty full day.

Dynamite doesn't discriminate, and even fish that aren't worth eating are killed along with everything else near the blast.

This large fish was still alive and had avoided the prying eyes of the dynamiters, but had become wedged upside down in this coral. I pulled the fish out and used the trout fishing revival technique to force water through its gills. Within a few minutes of this, the fish swam off under a coral to recover. I thought it was a job well done, but I later found out that one of the dynamiters had seen me revive the fish, and he pulled it out from under the coral and killed it.

There is actually a live fish in this photo, see if you can spot it (hint, it's not the one that's upside down).

This stonefish survived the dynamite blast and didn't respond to me taking pictures of it either. See if you can find it pictured in the photo above.

This white eyed moray eel leered out from under his protective coral head. This photo ran in the August 22nd Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The eel will lurk in wait, then dart out from its hiding place to snatch unsuspecting victims with sharp pointy teeth.

Lionfish might be cool to look at, but their fins can inflict very painful stings. Luckily I haven't experienced this first hand. This photo ran in the August 22nd Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The crown of thorns starfish is a menace to corals, and a large population of them is an indicator that the ecosystem is out of whack.

When I surfaced beside the pump boat, I thought that Mt. Mayon was framed perfectly by the hull of the boat. This photo ran in the August 22nd Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

After a hard days work, we went to a local place for a traditional Filipino dinner. From Left: Corey, Dave, Lex, me, Kim.