June

June was a surprise one. With quite a few maybe’s interested in our June IDC Special, but eventually no takers, we decided to cancel it.  Then the next day, who should walk through the door but out old friend Steve McGill.  After a mere 15 minutes catching up he asked, “So, do you have an IDC running anytime soon?”

So we geared back into action and our IDC was now running in full force.

Steve was lucky to have one-on-one attention from Course Director, Mike, and sailed through the IE. He is now living in Cebu planning to teach in Mactan.

L-R: PADI Instructor Examiner George Wegman, Steve, Mike (CD)

Mike had a few days off after he finished Steve’s Instructor Specialty ratings, but soon it was nose back to the grindstone as our two candidates for the July IDC arrived on July 9th.

July

Ronnie, from Germany, has just settled in El Nido in Palawan and is planning on opening a dive center in this newly discovered area.  He already owns the Habibi Shisha Restaurant which he runs with his lovely wife, Charo, so we are sure he will do well.

Katie comes from the UK and had just finished university. On the day she arrived, she got news of getting a first class degree, so double congratulations to her! Katie stayed with us for a month after the IDC to get some teaching experience and is taking the next year off to teach diving before going back to start her job in the UK. During her time with us she also worked on getting some of our staff certified as Open Water Divers. We offer this to our staff for free.

Also congratulations to Gareth our old instructor, who came back for a visit and completed his PADI IDC Staff Instructor Course. Sadly for us, Gareth has now returned to his fab job on the cruise ships in the Caribbean, but we hope to see him back in March next year.

L-R: George, Ronny, Katie, Mike

August

Yet again, no sooner had Ronnie and Katie finished their Instructor Specialty ratings, than Petr and Helen started their IDC Prep Course for the August IDC.

This is Petr’s third time with us. In ‘normal life’ he is a brain surgeon in the Czech Republic and has been coming to us every year for his vacation. In August 2008 he completed PADI Divemaster at TSD.  Last August he did his Assistant Instructor.  And this year he went all the way with the PADI Dive Instructor Course.

After completing the IDC, Helen did very well in the IE achieving mostly top grades and her PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor Rating.  Petr skipped the IE to travel to Bohol with his girlfriend who had been seriously neglected during the IDC, and will either come back in January or take it back home in freezing cold Prague – brrrr!

Helen is staying with us for another month for Specialties and some teaching experience on our MSDT Prep Program.

Congratulations to all our new PADI Instructors
and best of luck in your future careers!

Octopus

Ornate Ghost Pipefish

Flatworm

Pygmy Seahorse

Thresher Shark

Generous to a fault, on his last night, Hugh treated the crew, staff and their families to a night in Oscar’s Restaurant and a feast of lechon baboy – a whole spit roasted pig, the traditional celebration dish of the Philippines!

Lechon Baboy

Full Moon on Malapascua

If you have enjoyed these photos there are plenty more of his Malapascua trip and also many more from some of the spectacular locations Hugh has visited including Fiji, Wakatobi, Lembeh and Tonga for whales.

We hope to see Hugh back again at Christmas!

This year we were awarded finalist in two out of the five categories: the Project AWARE Conservation Award and the Outstanding Dive Center Business Award.

The Project AWARE award is one that we actually won last year, and we are very happy to have continued recognition of our conservation efforts. Currently we are focusing on adding to our artificial reef mostly thanks to Matt and Emma’s hard work over the last month.  More on that story coming soon!

We are especially pleased  and proud to receive the Outstanding Dive Center  Finalist award for the second year in a row. The award recognizes outstanding achievements across all areas of our operation. TSD always tries to maintain the high standards we have not let slip since opening, but we also continue to expand into new areas. In the last year alone we have…

• Introduced PADI IDCs and Instructor level courses to Malapascua
• Expanded our diving internship program to become one of the most successful in the Philippines
• Introduced the new PADI Tec Rec courses – another first for Malaspacua
• Continued to offer other diving destinations within the Philippines such as Donsol for whale shark watching and Tubbataha liveaboards, and also expanded our dive travel to include liveaboards in Thailand and Indonesia and the fabulous new M/Y Philippine Siren.
• Continued to provide top quality service in terms of PADI Dive Courses and the amazing local fun diving in Malapascua.
• Expanded our lines of dive equipment for sale, including becoming official Suunto dealers.

It is the most prestigious award granted by PADI and we were up against some very tough competition.  As a relatively new business compared to most of our competitors, it means an awful lot to us.

PADI regional manager, Jimmy Christrup visited Malapascua recently to formally present us with our awards.

L-R TSD Instructors and DMs: Holly, Riza, Justin, Dino, JN, Gibb, Mike, Andrea and Jimmy Christrup from PADI

Also this year we have been awarded the following:

Project Aware 2009 International Environmental Achievement Award

The International Environmental Achievement Award honors dive operators around the world who display commitment and excellence in their efforts to protect underwater environments within business operations and their community.

“The Environment Achievement Award is about rewarding vision, excellence and pursuit of conservation. More importantly, this award ensures the enjoyment of underwater environments for future generations.”

Go Eco Status

The main objective of Project AWARE’s Go ECO is for dive centres to minimize their impact on the aquatic ecosystem whilst contributing to environmental, economic and cultural conservation. Dive centres are required to meet best practice environmental guidelines and commit to the Project AWARE Go ECO philosophy.

Joanne Marston, Manager, of Project AWARE Asia Pacific added, “We are pleased to recognize Thresher Shark Divers as a Go ECO Operator. We look forward to working with them to implement environmental best practices and educate tourists about how they can travel responsibly.”

L-R: George Wegmann (PADI Instructor Examiner), Dustin, Mike (CD), Karlis, Henrik

This IDC was definitely a fun one as everyone knew each other very well. Dustin, Karlis and Soren are all long termers at TSD and Malapascua – at least 6 months each, and Henrik had been here for 2 months completing his DM.

The IDC flew by with our resident Course Director, Mike, at the helm. All too quickly they were off to beautiful Dumaguete for the PADI Instructor Exam where they achieved the much deserved qualification of PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor.

All 3 continued on to take PADI Specialty Instructor ratings, with Henrik doing no less than 13!  Joining them here and there along the way to add to their Specialty Instructor ratings, were already certified instructors Bernita, Holly, Justin, Matt and even our own Dino!

We wish them all the best of luck in their future careers, with Karlis heading off to his job in the Red Sea, Soren to Thailand, and Henrik off to finish diving the length and breadth of the Philippines before maybe trying to find work… Dustin will be staying with us at TSD to continue in his unofficial post as head nudibranch spotter and identifier whilst teaching and guiding in between.

The last two months on Monad Shoal have just been crazy, crazy, crazy, with big stuff absolutely everywhere. All our divers have been coming back every day with huge, beaming smiles and great photos.

To start with, there have been plenty of thresher sharks to go around. And the mantas are out in full force. Also devil rays are being seen in numbers I have never heard of before – up to 30 at a time.  Devil rays flying in squadron formation is truly a sight to behold, it almost feels like you are in Star Wars!

As an example, earlier this week there was an almost unheard of 6 thresher sharks circling at the same time. And as if that wasn’t enough, the lucky divers went back later that afternoon and saw 5 mantas.  Quite a day’s diving.

This almost beats Trevor’s all time world record from back in 2004.  He was doing a 75 minute nitrox dive with our old friend Alain and they had 7 sharks circling at once.

Peter Quinn was with us recently and managed to shoot these excellent video clips on just his basic point and shoot camera.

On a related note, probably the most popular question asked by divers coming to Malapascua Island is, “When is the best time for thresher sharks?”

Well, as threshers are wild animals, they don’t always come when they are supposed to, so it is tricky question to answer. But I will try my best:

Threshers can be seen year round and it is very rare to have a day when one is not seen on Monad Shoal. But there are times of the year when the general tendency is better and there are more sharks around.

Over my 7 years on Malapascua Island,  June to October have been the months when we see the most, whereas January and February are not so good. But having said that, January and February 2008 and 2009 were great for threshers and September 2008 was not. And this year, April and May have been just amazing.

So go figure…

What does this mean?

Book your holiday whenever is best for you and you are almost guaranteed to have some great shark sightings!  But it is a good idea to come for at least 4 days diving just in case, to make sure you get that special experience.

But for the inside scoop, my favorite month has always been September

As you know if you have been here, the local community is very poor. The Philippines itself has huge problems with poverty. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and according to international data, 44 % of the population subsist on US$2 or less a day.

One of the main contributors to poverty anywhere is population growth. In the Philippines it is the main cause of poverty, over and above even corruption. Population is growing at an alarming rate, currently 2.36% per year and  is expected to increase from around 84 million in 2006 to a staggering 111 million in 2015. Reasons include a lack of family planning, lack of education, lack of access, lack of funding etc etc. And the laws in the Philippines only serve to compound this – artificial methods of contraception are strongly discouraged and abortion is illegal. Read more on this.

The Philippines is a very catholic country and the government is seemingly intent on expanding its population, at the very time in the Earth’s history when it should be cutting back. It is not unusual for women here to have up to 10 or more children, their families living on something around the equivalent of USD50 per month.

But back to Malapascua. Our staff used to be primarily men so pregnancy issues were not something that affected us. But when we opened the bar and restaurant 2 years ago, we started employing more women. Over this time we have lost many of them temporarily or permanently to pregnancy. The lucky ones have ‘supportive’ partners. The unlucky ones are barely out of adolescence and left alone to care for their child(ren). The up side is that Filipino families are communal, so there are usually relatives to help care for the child, allowing the young mother to go back to work.

But to my shock and dismay, I recently found out about a worrying trend on the island. It’s a secret, but everyone seems to know. The young women are finally fighting back at tradition and the law and saying that they are not yet ready for babies.  They are not prepared to be celibate (the reasons for this open a whole other debate), contraception is not widely available, not affordable and/or not known about. So in their eyes, there is only one other horrendous path open to them: backstreet abortions by varying, often life-threatening, methods.

As soon as I found out about this, I set out on a mission to do something about it. This used to be slightly related to my field back in my old life, but I am a little rusty to say the least, and had little idea where to begin in a country where even the most basic forms of birth control are frowned upon and difficult to get.

After a ton of web research, I decided to start with a talk and discussion. Armed with a powerpoint presentation I had written, a stack of condoms, a banana and some thermometers, we met in the classroom for an afternoon of education and hilarity. If you have ever met our girls, you know that they like to giggle, so this was certain to be a fun session.

Me and my gals

I had no idea what to expect or even if they would be interested. But they had greeted news of the session with glee and enthusiasm and everyone who could come attended. I anticipated their current education to be limited to basic biology mixed in with a few old wives tales. When I remembered the limited knowledge of many teenage girls in the west, it did make me wonder what would come up. My mind always returned to our waitress who carried a pouch of garlic in her underpants throughout her pregnancy to ward off vampires from sucking her unborn baby’s blood…

Their knowledge was indeed limited, but they listened with wide eyes, asked lots of questions, and I hope learned a great deal. Their knowledge and misconceptions were actually very similar to their Western counterparts’.

We had a lot of fun, we giggled a lot, we practiced using condoms on a banana which we gave to Dino afterwards, although failed to trick him into eating it. The girls took the used condoms afterwards to fill up with water and thrown over each other. They each took home a sheaf of condoms for their own use, a certain lady chef promising to practice that very night with her husband, our lucky compressor man.  ☺

We will be running a follow up session soon and I intend it to be an ongoing program. I will personally be sponsoring contraception for all our girls and helping them use it effectively. Hopefully we can prevent a few unwanted children on Malapascua and help our girls have children when they are ready, rather than when fate dictates. Who knows, if it works out, I would love to be able to extend it to the whole island.

If you are interested in receiving our regular updates, you can sign up here:

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Looks beautiful, right? And it is. But this tiny island, only 2 km long, is so isolated that the things I previously took for granted, like electric cables, phone lines or a sanitized water supply, were seriously lacking when I first arrived 7 years ago.

When you turn on a light switch, you expect a light to come on, right?

Not necessarily on Malapascua.

When you turn on the shower you expect clean, hot water, right?

Not in my house.

And most importantly it seems for many of our visitors, when you go online, you expect to be able to surf the internet at lightning fast speeds and not have to wait 30 minutes for facebook to load.

Right?

Ha ha, not here

As I told one of my old schoolfriends with whom I recently reconnected (thank you facebook), “I live in the Philippines on a tiny wee island, where cold water is de rigueur and electric is optional.” And don’t even talk to me about how many hours it took to send that facebook message on my snail connection.

But NOT ANY MORE!!!!

In the same month, we were blessed with not one, not two, but all three of these modern necessities!!!

Electric

Up until now “Island Electric” ran from 6pm-11pm, was notoriously unreliable, of variable voltage and incredibly expensive – 8 times the price of mainland power. Most business ran their own generators which is also expensive, wasteful, hard to maintain and terrible for the environment.

But finally, after many years in the making, we have 24 hour power. This is great for the businesses but more importantly it is has changed the life on the locals who are being plugged in gratis in an effort by the government to electrify the outback.

Yeah!

Water

Although most of the resorts now have hot water, it had, up until now, evaded me at home.  But after finally finding a decent plumber I can now have steaming hot showers any time of the day or night.

Double Yeah!

Wi-Fi!!!

It’s sad to say, but I am actually more excited by the advent of wifi that I am of electric.  It means I can now spend all day writing these blogs!

With no landlines or any other traditional means of getting a strong internet signal, and after 5 months of messing around with the wi-fi company, we finally have super fast wi-fi in the dive shop!!!  It is the fastest internet connection on the island and is currently free of charge for all our customers.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Added to this, we have just had a stonking satellite system installed, specifically to show the World Cup.  So if you fancy spending June diving during the day and watching the football in the evenings, then Malapascua is your place!

Life is now perfect in paradise!

But we always want to improve and for the last few months we have been looking for a new chef to move us up to the next level.   After much searching and many interviews we finally hired Executive Chef Val.  Val has worked as head chef and sous chef in some of the top restaurants in Cebu including Tinderbox and Abaca where I have had some of the best food in my life.  So how could we turn him down?

In the short time he has been with us, he has shaken up Oscar’s and added a serious extra spark to our menu, while retaining our old style.  Chef Val, quite simply, loves food, and it shows in his dishes.  He manages to put together ingredients that work perfectly together – ingredients that you would never ever mix in a million years, melt together in a food frenzy in your mouth. A menu item that you think, “Huh?” works so well, you write down the ingredients and take it home to try out for yourself.

Oscar’s menu changes every day, and each evening I sit down, look at the menu of the day and want to order one of everything. It is that good.

Val is particularly fond of fusion foods and has come up with some amazing dishes. Yesterday it was Tropical Shepherd’s Pie.  A contradiction in terms you may think.  But the mixture of this traditional English dish with pineapple and a semi-sweet gravy was so incredibly delicious, I had it again for breakfast the next day.  I can’t wait to see what he does with the fish and chips…

And his triple chocolate mousse…. Don’t even get me started on the triple chocolate mousse.  This is possibly my all-time favorite dessert ever (along with crème brulee). I have eaten it in many restaurants in many cities all around the world, and Chef Val’s is about the scrummiest I have ever had anywhere ever.   I had it 3 days in a row before Trevor forbade any more due to expanding waistline concerns.

Don’t get me wrong, Oscar’s still has a range of dishes to suit everyone, including our traditional British fare, but now it comes with that little bit of extra panache!

Anyway, the point of all this rant about divine food is to say WELCOME CHEF VAL!  You are an angel sent from heaven to delight our taste buds!

This is hot on the heels of our recent visit last week to the local school to hold a Project Aware Kids event. As part of our ongoing effort to protect the local environment, we have an outreach program for the local kids. Our island is very small with only one junior school and one high school. Many of the kids that attend are the children of our employees, but many are also the children of local fishermen. No matter what their parents do for the living, most of them depend on the health of the local reefs to survive.

We believe in change through education and also in providing alternatives to fishing.  By employing almost exclusively members of the local population we hope to help alleviate the burden of local parents to feed their families by fishing. Through education we hope to change behavior to protect the local environment, both above and underwater and we need to work with the next generation of Malapascuans as well as the current.

Project AWARE were kind enough to send us a huge box full of goodies for our event. Their fab kids materials include stickers, activity books, and teacher’s guides. The books are chock-a-block with  fun facts, information and ideas to promote environmental awareness.

Armed with these materials, our intrepid team headed off to the ‘barrio’ (village). Head of the charge was Mike – our soon to be resident Course Director – along with TSD’s Filipino DM JN, interns Sanna and Liz and general helper-outers Jason and Carley.

We chose the age group of 12 and 13 years olds for our first classroom presentation, as the school teachers thought they would be the most receptive.

We handed the books out and talked though each section, told them about Project AWARE. The colorful books were a big hit.

JN led the classroom session as he was born and bred on Malapsacua and of course speaks the local language.  Although naturally shy, he soon warmed to the role and the kids obviously loved him – he is a well known face on the island and it is seemingly every Malapascua child’s dream to grow up to be a Divemaster!  They discusses many aspects of conservation and underwater life, including various local marine life and of course our thresher sharks – their importance to the local economy and their place as apex predators in the food chain. Sustainable fishing methods were also discussed, as well as the trash problem faced on the island and our regular cleanup events.

Next off we handed out Project Aware stickers and gave each child an activity postcard.  They were instructed to take them home, complete the conservation-related word puzzle on the back, and return it to their teachers the next day so we could post them to Project AWARE for their recognition certificates.  Amazingly, out of the 57 distributed, all 57 were returned the very next day!!!

As trash is a big problem on the island, and things tend to get thrown away wherever and whenever they are no longer needed, Sanna had devised an inventive game.  She distributed wrapped candies to all the children, then they had to throw the wrappers into a trash can from a distance.  Whoever, got the wrappers in the trash can got another candy.  Pavlov, check out Malapascua

It was a very successful day.  The kids loved it and were all very interested in what we had to say, and they hopefully took some of it in.  Of course we do not expect miracles overnight, but we hope with a continued effort we can make a difference.

Thank so much to Project Aware for all the materials, the kids and the teachers loved them!

And for anyone who is thinking about doing any PADI course or wants to replace their cert card with a shiny new Project AWARE version -  be sure and give a donation to Project AWARE to receive a special certification card, the money really does go to a cause.