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San Miguel Islander with
Mt. Mayon in the background: Bicol, Philippines
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Philippine Daily Inquirer Publication
- August 2004
In July Corey Ridings, a Coastal Resource Management
volunteer from my Peace Corps group invited me to her site in Bicol
to take photos of the San Miguel Island marine sanctuary. The local
barungay captain was under pressure to open the sanctuary up to fishing,
and the photos that I would take would be used to give the local decision
makers a view of the undersea world just in front of their doorsteps.
The trip was quite an adventure, I got food poisoning in Manila on the
way to Bicol (in the middle of a 10 hour bus ride). Luckily it was nothing
some antibiotics couldn't take care of, and we were diving the next
day in the San Miguel sanctuary with Corey's co-workers Lex and Dave
from Bicol University's Tobaco campus. For comparison's sake, we did
one photo survey inside the sanctuary and one outside the sanctuary.
The first dive went off without incident, but as we prepared to dive
outside the sanctuary, everyone in the boat saw a plume of water spout
up into the air from a dynamite blast just under the surface off in
the distance.
Some local fishermen had thrown a homemade dynamite stick
on the already degraded reef outside the sanctuary to stun and kill
the fish with the blast so they could be easily caught. Needless to
say, the dynamite kills more than just the fish, and the corals in this
area were a wasteland of silt and algae. Dynamite fishing is illegal
here in the Philippines, and we started to chase the culprits who started
paddling frantically away to escape to the island nearby. We immediately
suited up and went underwater to take photos
of the damage, and unbelievably the dynamite fishermen must have
thought we were gathering their illegal booty and came back to gather
up the dead fish. Since they were right in front of us, I took photos
of them to catch them in the act, we still haven't heard whether they
have been caught unfortunately.
In the Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
on August 22nd five of my photos ran on the front page to accompany
an article written about the local islanders working to protect their
marine sanctuary on San Miguel Island. Click
here to see the full front page cover (file size~250k). You can
see better views of the photos from the story in my photo journal about
the trip to Bicol here.
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