News from El Galleon Dive Resort & Asia Divers, Puerto Galera

The big excitement in Puerto Galera over the past while has been the thresher sharks. This photo is by one of our instructors, Andy Xie. He’s been able to get very close to the thresher sharks using his rebreather and if you read further down you’ll see the reason why he’s been getting so close to these magnificent creatures.

Puerto Galera has just been booming with thresher shark sightings over the past few weeks. Seems like there are six of them in the area now which is truly amazing. We sure do hope that they stick around for a while!

Video credit : Rob Jacobs / Calypso Multimedia

Maine Maritime Academy experience tropical diving for the first time

Oh what it week it will be!! Alan Verde and Tim Schroder are here from the Maine Maritime Academy with eighteen 20+ year olds who have never done tropical diving before. Being used to cold water diving they’ve taken the plunge mostly just in shorts and T-‘s and they are all smiling about it.

So far on day two they are completely blow away from the marine biodiversity and some have already seen one of our neighborhood sharks too! We’re all looking forward to a great week with them.

What’s been happening this week at Asia Divers

Fantastic to have Edward Lin and his friends here from Taiwan (Larry, Wu, Jean, and Yang). They had an amazing few days enjoying all the awesome diving including diving with…guess what?!

Status Quo for the wooden-hulled private boats of Puerto Galera

We appeal to all friends to help us, please sign this petition. This is to try to stop the phase out of the private bangkas. If this happens it will affect tourism in Puerto Galera in a major way. Please pass this along and sign.

Rebreather divers help tangled thresher shark in Puerto Galera

It’s been quite a week for thresher shark sightings in Puerto Galera. There have been 3-4 of them around pretty much every day now and our divers are getting some real close encounters with them. Unfortunately there is fishing line tied up around two of them. Andy Xie and Aaron Gillespie went out on their rebreathers. Check out the report from Andy below.

Day 1: With a 120-minute bottom time, we finally gained the trust from the sharks, and the opportunities to get closer. Actually there are two sharks tangled in fishing lines. The lines cut deeply in their dorsal fins. We made two successful cuts out of three times attempts, and removed half of the lines from the shark that was in a worse situation. We will continue this action tomorrow to remove as many lines as we can. We appreciate it a lot that when Asia Divers learned about our plan, they assign us a boat free of charge, and give us many supports. Divers: Andy Xie and Aaron Gillespie.

Day 2: It didn’t go smoothly as we expected. 120 minutes bottom time. The healthy shark came first to detect as it did yesterday. Then brought us a new friend, a thresher with a bent dorsal fin (is it an injury from badly fight or hit? See photo 7), using pectoral fins with great effort to keep balance. Three sharks came closer to us, but the two tangled didn’t show up. Is it because the temperature increased by 1℃ or they are afraid of seeing too many divers? We removed fishing lines at the bottom about 20m long to prevent further harms to the creatures. We will dive tomorrow as well. Wish us good luck to cut off more lines from the sharks.