A BOOBY bird the size of a duck outfitted with an extra wide wingspan hovered close to the water a few yards from our speed boat.
For a moment, everyone onboard dropped what they were doing and stared at the bird that resembled a pterodactyl. It then turned its head and stared back at us in midair.
“Watch out for your eyeballs!” somebody shouted, as the booby pointed its 12-inch-long beak in our direction. We watched in awe as it swept over our heads and glided towards the direction of Bird Islet half a mile away. Boobies prey on fish by diving into the sea and pursuing their prey underwater. All of us had our sights locked on the curious bird as it climbed higher. The airspace above us was filled with hundreds of different species of boobies, noddies and other shorebirds that I have never seen before. Suddenly, the surreal lull onboard was broken when someone requested, “Please pass the sunscreen.”
First descent
Scuba diving in the middle of the Sulu Sea with a group of scientists and marine biologists was, for lack of a better adjective, indeed otherworldly. After a back roll entry, I groped for my power inflator hose and did a quick buoyancy test. When our team leader gave the thumbs down signal, I began my first descent in Tubbataha, trailing the outer wall of an ancient underwater volcano that had been extinct for millions of years.
The first thing that I saw was a remora. With its worm-like movement, it twirled from side to side as it emerged from a jumbled colony of massive corals on the edge of the drop-off. Don’t remoras attach themselves to a host in order to feed on the scraps of fish that float away when the host eats? Then I saw the host, a white tip shark, swimming above our heads.
The situation was already indescribable, it was made even more stunning by the clarity and astounding visibility underwater. On one side was a vertical wall rising from the unseen seabed below. It was covered with living creatures, contoured with cracks, caves and overhangs.
If the wall was epic, the opposite side was cinematic. Three dimensional even. It was a virtual production staged on vast blue nothingness, where performers appeared and disappeared in the form of sharks, manta rays, sea turtles, barracudas and shoals of tuna.
Situated within the territorial waters of the Municipality of Cagayancillo, Palawan, the Tubbataha Reefs are composed of two uninhabited true atoll formations which were formed when volcanic eruptions created islands that through the millennia have attracted the growth of fringing reefs and corals. The reefs formed rings with a lagoon in the center and coral flats in the shallow portions and in some areas are sand bars which offer breathtaking panoramic seascapes (WWF 2006).
Congregating at the edge of the drop-off were hundreds of silvery blue fusiliers, huge jacks, humongous groupers, pretty snappers, giant trevallies, flirty sweetlips, schools of siganids, popping parrot fishes, shady Napoleon wrasses, blue tangs, clown fishes, the list was endless.
Thick colonies of hard and soft corals covered the reef crest, while gorgonian sea-fans and Tubastraea cup corals dominated the precipitous walls.
It was during the summer of 2008 that I volunteered on an expedition to this underwater paradise. The trip, for scientific research, was organized by a Cebu-based, non-profit organization advocating marine bio-diversity conservation.
The job was to conduct a transect line survey, in which we had to lay a 50 meter measuring tape on the sea floor and record everything on the seabed cover using the tape as guide. It is one method used to assess the sessile (non-moving) benthic (bottom dwelling) community of coral reefs. It was pretty cool taking notes, writing with a Mongol 2 pencil on a white plastic slate board under 50 feet of sea water side by side predators (and prey) in the middle of the Sulu Sea.
Keep calm
For a moment, I was breathing rapidly and consuming air fast.
I then remembered my dive instructor’s caution, “Never ever hold your breath when breathing compressed air underwater.” Doing so would cause serious lung injury. Once you close your airway or hold your breath, the air expanding in your lungs will cause your alveoli to rupture due to the high pressure air from the scuba tank.
Visibility was 30 meters when I reached down to check my depth and pressure gauges. One hundred fifty bar, 40 feet. I squinted in pain as a droplet of seawater trickled down my left eye and the lenses of my mask started to form patches of fog, reducing visibility to zero. Training taught me that I needed to let in more seawater into my mask to cleanse the lenses, then clear the water out by tilting my head and blowing a blast of air from my nostrils. Visibility increased to 40 meters. It felt good to see the underlining of the surface forming a silvery mantle separating the watery domain from the realm above. When water, or any fluid, gets into contact with air, it forms a surface. This is called surface tension.
Flight of the manta ray
Unexpectedly, I saw a giant manta ray. It came flying straight into our faces from the blurry divide called the deep blue. My first thought was to get the attention of the other divers so we could share the exciting moment together. But the others were out of sight, so I reached out and pointed out the oceanic revelation to my dive buddy.
What would you do if an animal as big as your dining room table swam directly towards you in a place where you are surrounded by 130 miles of open sea? At the spur of the moment, I decided to hide behind my dive buddy. The manta passed right above us. With just two meters of pressurized sea water between us and the gigantic manta, my senses failed to distinguish if the situation was real or not. It went further on, towards the shallows, flying like a butterfly. I wanted to give in to the chase, but realized that the undertow was gaining speed, triggering my fear of getting swept out into the open ocean.
It was deep in the walls of Tubbataha where I felt the real sensation of flying or neutral buoyancy. Tata Osorio