Thursday, August 23, 2007 So: It’s not the sharks Cebu pro divers fear By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
WHEN you happen to be in the company of professional divers, it’s best to just listen most of the time because your voice gets drowned in their laughter. You learn many things from them and you get insights about what one highly skilled diving instructor describes as their “own little world.”
The pro diver is the one who explores dive sites, learns from his exploration, adopts sound practices of other divers, puts premium on safety underwater, and eats with gusto after each dive, mindless of belly protrusions after.
Cebu’s dive spots are world-renowned—Mactan, Malapascua, Moalboal. Just by looking at the nationalities of the divers in these areas, you know that Cebu is an international diving destination. Davao City’s dive sites are all found in the Island Garden City of Samal (a 10-minute ferry ride from the mainland) but if you’ve explored one, you’d want to check out the others because there is so much to see.
But beauty attracts the beast too. In Cebu, the emergence of shady dive “schools” and insufficiently trained divers is threatening the sector that has put us in the itinerary of tourists and adventure-seekers. With apologies to lawyer Augusto Go, honorary consul general of the Republic of Korea in Cebu, because he fends off criticisms about Koreans every now and then, the Koreans who try to teach or learn diving are posing a problem like bends to the local pro divers.
Owing to the language barrier, Koreans prefer, or are enticed, to take diving lessons from Korean divers. Cebuano diving instructors are wary in taking them as students because they barely understand English and often ignore hand signals. When you are voiceless, you rely on your hands to be understood. A hand signal can save your life. A moving hand claw means hold on to the rock so you won’t drift with the current and not “nice breasts.”
Cebuano pro divers don’t fear the shark or the venomous jellyfish; they fear the Korean divers for what they will or can do when they’re submerged. The rule is: see, watch, take pictures but don’t touch. It being a rule, it is ignored by many Korean divers, to the consternation of other divers.
Korean dive shops offer open-water courses at half the cost of the tuition set by established ones in Cebu. To make up for the low fee, they pack 10 to 12 students to a course, which is far too many for an instructor to look after and teach. Most often, it’s not even an instructor but just a dive master who handles the class. (A DM only acts as guide, checks the equipment and assists the instructor.) So they “finish” the course, get their certification, but barely know how to adjust their buoyancy. They do look nice in their wet suits though.
The Koreans make business bad for the local diving shops and scrupulously certified diving instructors.
Korean divers are not so much a problem in Davao than the absence of a decompression or hyperbaric chamber. In the Philippines, decompression chambers are located in Cebu, Manila, Batangas, Subic and Palawan.
If anyone diving in Samal or anywhere in Mindanao figures in a life-threatening accident or decompression sickness, which can be fatal if not treated asap, he has to be airlifted in a low-flying plane to the nearest location of a decompression chamber.
Samal has much to offer as a dive spot—the wall in Big Ligid is awesome—but without a decompression chamber near it, it will not get a pin in the maps of professional divers. Davao’s pro divers are reminding Tourism Secretary Ace Durano of his promise to put up a hyperbaric chamber in Davao.
In the meantime, the divers just enjoy the underwater sights and each other’s company and complain about what Koreans are doing to their industry.
