Allez

I always believed that if I weren’t into the sport of cycling, I’d be in the sport of diving. I learned to love the seas when as a young boy, I latched on to my grandfather and my Uncle Pepe almost every Sunday when they would go out and visit their fish-traps called “bobo”, a contraption made of bamboo bark. They were not always happy to see me since I was more of a distraction, but I was persistent and besides, I got up earlier than them so they had no choice but to let me join them. However, I never had their patience when it comes to fishing. So for most of my childhood years, Sundays were spent at the beach.

Unlike my cousins, I wasn’t really a good swimmer and I have never speared a fish. Still, I loved to go to the sea, whether it was high tide or low tide, daytime or at nighttime, when we’d go out and look for crabs.

So when I learned from Missy Torralba about the friendly (hungry, actually) whale sharks in Oslob right before Christmas, I made up my mind to bring along my wife, Tata and my two kids, Alexa and Eddy, to experience something they might never experience in their lifetime.

Last Saturday, at 3:45am, we left for Oslob. We got there two and a half hours later. We were their first guests. We paid Php300 each to a town rep and were immediately taken to the feeding grounds, less than a hundred meters from the shoreline.

When the guide said calmly, “There it is!” I looked to the right and I saw the dull tip of the large fin, followed by a sharper but smaller fin. It gave me the biggest goose bumps in my life! It was a mom and her baby. After some hesitation, I jump into the water and looked at the leviathans from their perspective. If there were words cooler than “cool”, it wouldn’t be enough to describe the sight! Wow! Indeed, swimming with whale sharks is more fun in the Philippines!

After the experience, I wanted to save the giants but it’s more complicated than that. I don’t have the experience nor can I give an advice on how to handle the situation. I’m sure there are experts in that area. While I didn’t regret what we did, I wished there was a better way of experiencing the whale sharks. The way the small boats crisscross the feeding grounds could easily hurt the animals. Also, I know that feeding these animals would lead to their dependence on humans and loss of their natural ability to feed themselves in the wild.

I wish I had the solutions but I know that I don’t. But what I firmly believe is that the government should not run this program, they’ll just mess it up. Instead, they should let some NGO’s who knows how to run these kinds of things take over and put up a system that will sustain this attraction for a long, long, time.

In the end, the solution should be is a win-win for both the whale sharks and the people who are depending on the fish for survival. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. - THE FREEMAN