Malapascua is a small island located in the Visayan Sea, off the northern tip of the larger island of Cebu in The Philippines. While many tourists visit Malapascua for the perfect white sand beaches, the main draw is scuba diving.
This place is an underwater paradise, and on top of its coral crown rests one of the greatest opportunities in the scuba world:
A chance to see the rarely seen Thresher Shark
Having never scuba'd before, I had my work cut out for me. The Threshers typically live in deep water between 100-500 meters. Malapascua is ideal for spotting the sharks because it is located near "Monad Shoal", a small, flat topped Shoal jutting some 250m up from the surrounding ocean floor. The top of this shoal is about 15-35m below the surface of the ocean, making it only reachable by advanced divers. The sharks ascend early every morning to be "cleaned" by the wrasse fish who live atop the shoal. It's a symbiotic relationship that ensures the survival of both animals, and gives us tank-leashed-surface-dwellers a rare opportunity to view the Threshers.
In order to get my PADI Advanced Open Water Diver Certification, I had to first complete the Open Water Diver course. With my balls firmly pressed against the wall, I was able to complete both courses in just 7 days.
Scuba diving had long been on my list of things to do. From a very young age, I had an extreme fear of water, an extreme lack of swimming ability and the wretched curse of usually excelling at whatever I put my mind to. Being torn between a strong sense of self-reliance and an inability to overcome a silly fear was something I battled with for over a decade. I had largely banished my swimming phobia by the time I arrived on the shores of Malapascua, but the thought of being underwater still sent pangs of fear shooting through my limbic system.
The week began with studying the theory of scuba diving. Things like; how not to blow up your lungs, how to inspect your $1 O-ring so that you don't lose all your air 18m (60 feet) under the sea and of course, how to avoid the infamous nitrogen narcosis, were detailed over and over again. The idea of the basic OW course is to give the scuba diver the skills and knowledge required to dive to a depth of 18m. Other than breathing and swimming, which is really easy, you learn mostly equipment set up and contingency procedures. Apparently, when things go wrong with scuba diving, they go REALLY wrong. You need to be prepared.
Luckily for me, Poseidon had sent a guardian angel for me in the form of a French-Canadian instructor who was nicknamed "The General". Scuba Instructors in SE Asia tend to be a bit..."cruisey". The lifestyle of diving during the day, chilling on the beach during your down time and drinking copious amounts of booze everytime your students "graduate" doesn't make for the most hardened of professionals. The General on the other hand, was forged in the frigid depths of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. She was exact and measured. While other students were chilling out on a bean bag with their dive computers, my dive buddy and I were manually cramming pressure chart calculations into our nitrogen-laden brains. While vacationing-wannabe-divers were happily bobbing up and down as their instructors wistfully stared at the depths beyond, we were being pointed at angrily while we tried to swim upside-down, knocking weights over in the sandy bottom with our regulator. She made us the best divers we could be, and she took it very seriously.
Although all this military-esque training was making us more confident in the long run, for the short-term, we were on edge. Discipline is a double edged sword. On one hand, our solid foundation would prove us reliable in our future exploration of the ocean, but at the time, we were stressed out at the thought of having to repeat yet another extra-curricular exercise that The General had concocted. This stress started to manifest itself as my dive buddy's increasing anxiety. During the distance swimming exercise, he had a panic attack. Being a less-than-confident swimmer myself, I was struggling to tread water while calmly telling him to relax. He was set on giving up, right there. I tried to convince him to relax. The General was still in the boat, and after scoffing at his apparent struggle, she slipped into the water and expertly came to his aid. While holding him up she began to berate him with accusation, "why you can swim yesterday and not today?", she said with a French-Canadian tone of mockery. He eventually came to, and we finished our swimming test.
As we persevered, we learned from our mistakes and when the day came to do our final OW dive, we were gifted with the opportunity to go deeper than 18m at a premier dive site. Because of our solid foundation, our above-required knowledge and our honed buoyancy skills, the dive shop agreed to take us to "Kallangaman Island".The remote island was a perfect paradise, whose southeastern tip snaked into the ocean as a perfect spit of white, crytsalline sand. Under the surface, the island's coral reef dropped down sharply from about 8m to well over 50m as a perfect, sheer wall. A diver's dream, the wall provides a home for some of the most vibrant life SE Asia has to offer.
As we swam near the edge of the wall, I could feel my heart rate quicken and my breathing become shallow. In a conscious effort, I began to take slow, deep breaths. The General's French-Canadian accent reverberated in my head "It's impossible for your body to fully engage your biological fear response if you breathe in a slow, deep and rythmic manner." I could feel my face relax. This little trick I learned from The General has proven to save my ass both wet and dry many times since that day at the wall. In times of peril, I will slow my breathing and as the calmness washes over me, I can still see the edge of that wall in my mind.
When I crested the edge of the wall, I became... expansive. Breathing was no longer my concern. The visibility was easily 25m+ and I could see an entire world of life I never imagined could exist. It felt as though I had discovered a secret so good, so eye-opening and world-shattering, that all I wanted in that moment was to shed my worldly obligations and stay forever, weightless and awe-struck. As we descended, feet first, facing the wall, I could see the multitude of alien fish and coral drifting upwards.
Was I stationary as the wall rushed upwards or was I the one moving?
If not for the increasing pressure in my ears and the feeling of equalisation, I don't know if I could have accurately placed my position in that new world.
When we hit the 25m mark, The General signaled to stop. After checking to see if we were "OK", she began to swim horizontally along the wall. My wonder and amazement were quickly replaced with a flood of internal dialogue. "Am I neutrally buoyant?" "What's my depth?" "How much air have I consumed" "Is my dive buddy "OK"?". After running through the lists in my head, trying to normalize my breathing and getting into an efficient swimming position, I turned my attention back to the wall.
The wall teemed with life. Coral of all shapes and sizes interlaced with swarms of snapper, mooray eels and countless other reef dwellers. Suddenly, The General signaled to stop. Following her pointed finger, I was led to one of the strangest fish I had ever seen. The lionfish. A highly venomous fish, the lionfish clings to the coral and "scurries" about while wildly gyrating it's pectoral fins and spines. An alien in this world, I swam as close as I could to inspect the lionfish. It was fascinating. I snapped this shot to take back with me to my home world above.
I was hooked.
Next, The General pointed at me. Confused, I shrugged my shoulders in the universal sign for "what?". She then made the hand signal for "where's the boat?". A simple gesture where one presses the bottom edges of their hands into a V repeatedly, to represent the boat and then shrugs their shoulders while looking around for something in the blue. Turning around to put the wall on my right, I gestured back the way we came. She smiled, clapped her hands in approval and then instructed me to lead. Apparently, knowing where the boat is was a good thing.
A mere 200m back the way we came, I glanced over my shoulder to see her wildly rapping on her tank to get my attention. Returning to her and my dive buddy, I followed their excited gestures towards the wall. There, hidden in a small pocket of the wall, was a curled pile of opaque flesh. As I got closer, I realised what I was looking at:
A friggin' octopus
As you can see in the video, the octopus was impossibly strange. It's giant eyes and gasping valve gave the sense that it was studying me with a greater curiousity than I held for it, and its perfect camoflauge made me wonder how The General could have possibly found it admist the living wall.
After we arrived at the surface, we were over-flowing with excitement. The General rallied our fever and told us it was one of the best dives she had ever had. She was proud of us and believed us to be her best students. She then dropped the question.
"You wanna dive with the sharks?"
Still drunk on wonder, we agreed to undergo our Advanced Diver training. Our days now turned even more intense. Along with our mandatory Navigation and Deep Dive courses, we would have to pick 3 electives. We selected our dives carefully. Peak Performance Buoyancy, to hone our command of underwater flight, Night Diving, to test our navigation and communication skills and Underwater Photography, to give us a break from all the technical learning and just go out and have some fun. As we plowed through the course material, we became more and more confident. We swam through hula hoops in our buoyancy course, marvelled at rare shrimp, sea horses, and mandarin fish by flashlight during our night dive and learned to use the natural light filtering through the water to add an epic quality to our photos in the photography course. Diving was how we spent our days and talking about diving was how we spent our nights. The world had become exponentially bigger and we were eager to learn it's new secrets.
The night before our Deep Dive, my dive buddy and I sat down on the beach with a cold beer. We had known each other for 18 years, we had grown up together, played hockey together, been there for each other countless times, and now, we were about to conquer our fears and anxieties together. Diving was addictive. It was peaceful. It was dangerous. We knew we were going to get each others back no matter what, and we knew no shark or nitorgen bubble would be able to stop us both. Despite our deep rooted fears, we knew we could count on the other.
We were ready.
At 5am the alarm sounded and we groggily walked to the dive shop. While other students and fun divers sipped their coffee, we checked our own equipment, inventoried the milk crates that held our gear and sat through our de-briefing with The General. We would be the first in the water. We were to descend down the fixed line, so as not to be caught in the current, to arrive on top of Monad Shoal. Here we would head in the opposite direction of the Shark viewing area, descending to 32m. At this depth we would do some cognitive tests, to be sure we were not too loopy from the bends, and if all was well, we would head over to view the Sharks, should we be so lucky.
The waters surface was turbulent, and jumping off the back of the boat after our pre-dive checklist took some serious self-convincing. We held the tag line and awaited our fearless leader. As we drained the air from our floatation vests (BCD), the turbulent surface waters turned to a peaceful blue above us. The current tugged at my fins and the shoal arrived just below me before I had expected. I gracefully transitioned from an upright position to a horizontal position and signalled "OK" to my dive buddy and The General. As we swam down the slope of the shoal I could feel the immense pressure above start to compress my mask against my face like never before. I blew air out my nose to equalise the pressure and continued to slowly propel myself down the slope. At some point, I began to fall through the water ever so slowly. The weight above was greater than my own buoyancy could resist and I began to panic as I tried to compensate with my BCD while trying to equalise. Finally, I stopped falling, I was breathing heavily and we were only at 28m. I once again calmed myself with The General's trick. I felt as though I was dreaming. I stopped descending and breathed deeply as my companions paddled ahead of me. It didn't take them long to stop, and I could make out The General asking me to signal "OK". I thought about it. Am I OK? After self-assessing my thoughts and perceptions, I decided that I was fine, and signalled back.
When we arrived at our depth, The General pulled out her slate. She jotted down a simple math equation on it for my dive buddy to solve. He blinked slowly, and looked at her with an empty gaze. Did he not understand? He looked at me, his eyes giant and magnified behind the glass of his scuba mask. He blinked at me. There was nothing there. I waved my hand, and signalled him to respond, "are you OK?". A delayed response, he slowly raised his index finger to the side of his temple and moved it in little circles. He was not feeling "OK" at all. The General was quick to act, and grabbed him by the vest, we ascended 5m and waited, the emptiness left his eyes and he began to smile. She scolded him with her finger and shook her head. His smile grew. The narcosis had left. He looked at me and shrugged. That was exciting.We returned to our depth, solved our cognitive tests with ease and headed over to the viewing area.
There were three other divers already kneeling behind the ropes. We found our place next to them and waited. Within minutes, I could see the flash of the Threshers off in the distance. I became excited. People excitedly pointed and made "metal signs" with their hands. I pulled out my GoPro and waited. With nothing but the sound of bubbles escaping our collection of regulators, I peered out into the blue, and then it happened. 3m in front of me was the Thresher, it's long tail effortlessly gliding through the water, it's giant eye peering back at us. I was elated! I had come 100 feet below the surface of the ocean to watch an animal few people have ever seen.
My life long mission to conquer the water was accomplished.
I still look back on this experience today as the single most important moment in conquering my fear of water, and it concluded a lifetimes worth of psychological angst. Now I love the water, and I jump at the chance to get wet. Diving has become my number one hobby while travelling. I have seen all sorts of new and interesting things, met many amazing people and shared some of my most memorable moments because of it. The ocean is unforgiving, delicate and mysterious. Embrace her like I did. The more time you spend exploring her depths, the more you will be drawn to her.