The Hidden Treasure of Panagsama

First published in Options, The Edge Malaysia, January 9, 2017

A diving haven in Cebu holds a hidden surprise, just meters from shore.

I knew the exact distance to Moalboal, thanks to McDonalds.  There were signs along the road counting down the distance to the McDonald’s in the town, presumably the only one for miles around on the western coast of Cebu.

The country was scrubby, with low knobby limestone hills running along the spine of the island in a North-South orientation. The rocky nature of the island precluded the lush tropical growth I expected, except for the magnificent rain trees planted perhaps over a century or more ago, lining the main road. 

Stopping at some roadworks near Carcar city, before the hills began, vendors approached the car with packets of puffed rice crackers and chicharron, deep fried pork skin crisps, a local favourite to be savoured with a cold beer.

There were glimpses of the sea on the west coast as the road wound along the thinly populated coastline, past small, dimly-lit villages. McDonald’s informed me that I was just a few kilometers away from burger heaven. We rolled into Moalboal, a relatively large, busy town, and there it was, Golden Arches in its yellow and red glory, occupying pride of place in a small shopping mall, which must have made Moalboal the place to be for the young and restless in this part of the world.  Several bake-shops lined the road, selling local pastries with a variety of sweet fillings, and there were small stalls with chickens slowly roasting on automated rotisseries for takeaways.

A small side road branched off the main road and ran, for another 4km, towards the coastline, and the beach.  At the end of the road was Panagsama, an untidy straggle of low buildings on either side of a narrow road that petered out into a lane and eventually a walking path beside the beach.  There were gaudy restaurants, dive shops, small homely hotels, bars, cafes, tour agents, and bicycle and motorcycle rentals.  A cluster of pedi-cabs waited for customers under a tree, and visitors in shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops wandered around.

Just beyond the row of buildings was the expanse of the sea, serene and blue, and the vastness of open sky.  It was this, and what was below the surface of the sea, that drew visitors to Moalboal.

Ten minutes away by motorized boat from the rocky shoreline was the flat, vegetation covered island of Pescador.  There was no beach around it, only limestone undercut by the action of the sea. The vegetation was scrubby and you could swim around the island, it was that small.  But for the boats bobbing up and down on the sea around the island, the island itself wasn’t the attraction, because these were boats for scuba-divers.

The water was pale blue, with broken bracelets of light shifting and shimmering, and when I rolled over the side, I was in a different world of silence, broken by the sound of my own breathing.  This was one of the top diving sites at Moalbaol, which was one of the best dive destinations in Cebu.

The diving at Pescador was a wall dive, an easy, lazy drift around the vertical walls of the island, overgrown in a frenzy of hard and soft coral in a multitude of colours. The water was warm, there was barely a current, and the visibility was excellent. Swarms of small fish, like coloured confetti, congregated around clusters of coral, and if you were patient and sharp-eyed enough, you would see the wonders of the macro world living within the folds of the coral: transparent shrimp, hairy miniature crabs, remarkable fish cunningly camouflaged as to appear a part of the coral itself, and the pygmy seahorse, configured to look exactly like the coral it inhabited, right down to the bumps and irregularities.

Each of these creatures inhabited a unique biological niche which might be very small, remove it a few inches away from its habitat, and it would not survive, being seen and snapped up by a predator.  Within the intricate ecosystem, were many strange and symbiotic relationships. Aggressive but cute clownfish lived unharmed in otherwise stinging anemone, certain gobies and shrimp depended on each other, one warning of danger while the other provided the safety of a burrow in the sand.

predatory fish, but I saw no sharks, only rarely a large trevally, and the reason was apparent, for up on the surface, fishermen bobbed up and down in their small rowboats, with baited fishing lines hung over the sides. 

‘

These were subsistence fishermen who fished to feed their families as generations of fishermen before them had, harvesting the bounty of the generous sea, with excess catch sold at the local markets.  And so the diving was excellent, but it was also incomplete.

The diving was characteristic of the coastal area around Panagsama, with shallow waters, healthy, vibrant coral and an ecosystem altered by human intervention, in fishing out all the top predators. 

There was a remarkable exception to this observation, however, with the relative absence of predators contributing to it.

Just by Panagsama, a few meters from shore, and the restaurants and shops that ran along it, was a phenomenon hidden in plain sight, until you ducked your head or yourself completely underwater. 

When I first dived in, the water was dark, and seething, but it wasn’t water – it was fish, an enormous, amorphous, shapeless blob of small fish, moving and constantly shifting.  It was a huge school of sardines, moving like fluid metal, glinting silver in the sun.  It was an incredible sight, made all the more remarkable by its proximity to the shore, for when I looked up, there were the outlines of boats against the sun, and excited snorkelers at the surface, looking down at the mass of moving silver below them.

I couldn’t begin to estimate the number of fish, for it was a shape-shifting mass self-adjusting to any threat, whether that was a stream of bubbles from a scuba-diver below, or other fish.  There was frenetic energy in the massed fish, constantly darting about. When a few changed direction, the entire mass followed, as like a giant connected creature of indeterminate shape.

 There were a few other types of fish as well, perhaps sheltering in the great mass for safety in numbers, and if I was quiet, I could approach quite near to the moving wall of silvery fish without spooking the entire school into a silvery curtain fanning away from me. 

All this occurred just a short distance from shore, with all its activities: boats rowing by overhead, a weighted rope with freedivers practicing diving on a single breath, fishermen on the shore casting their lines.

There was a government-imposed ban on net fishing, for a few scoops of a fishing net would have made a fisherman wealthy and decimated the great fish ball.  The absence of predator fish also played a part; in the open ocean, such an enormous mass of food attracts sharks, whales, dolphins, and all other manner of predators.  But here in Panagsama, near the shore, the fish seemed relatively unmolested by natural predators or fishermen with fishing nets.

My dive master told me that the great sardine mass had been resident at Pescador island until a few years ago when they migrated towards Panagsama, and “it’s been getting bigger and bigger ever since”.

It was an easy dive, just meters underwater, for a sight rarely encountered by divers. There is a well-known annual sardine run off South Africa, which attracts a train of predators, from sharks, dolphins, seals, whales, fishermen, divers and spectators in boats, as well as dive-bombing sea birds when the great shimmering mass of fish is shallow enough for individual fish to be snatched from the sky.

Yet here, in Panagsama, the great mass of fish was resident all year round, making for an easy and rewarding dive. There were no ghostly sharks lurking in the shadows, no opportunistic trevallies and barracudas lunging into that great ball, no dolphins to herd and mass the fish into smaller schools to be attacked by other dolphins, just that surreal, shape-shifting mass of fish darkening the surface of the sea when seen from below.

In the evenings, visitors sat at beachside cafes and restaurants watching the day ebb from the sky, reflected in the shimmering surface of the restless sea. Unseen, yet just below the surface of the water was the bountiful coral gardens teeming with minute life, a drama played endlessly on the watery stage, and just meters away was that silvery moving mass of fish, the hidden treasure of Panagsama, epitomizing the promise and paradox of the constant life and death struggle at sea.