In the beginning, I never thought i would dedicate so much of my life to the underwater world. I was just a boy of 11 and my mom wanted to take a course and get her C-card. At the time she would have no one to dive with so by default the eldest son was her dedicated dive buddy, bag and equipment carrier.
We took a course Under Louie Barrios and unknown to us at the time he would be the strictest and most stringent Naui dive instructors in the philippines, an accolade he still holds to this very day. To me it was all fun and games. We learned diving theory and my favorite would be diving practice. We would learn it all or so i thought, basic skills and not so basic skills, louie being the hard ass that he was taught us and required us to know a lot of advanced skills as well. Ditching and donning, buddy breathing, 33foot weight belt retrieval just to name a few. Some skills of which were not even required then; and some of which are almost forgotten in the modern day. Of our class of Eight only two of us passed the two youngest ones at that. My mom and other classmates did go on to get their certifications but elsewhere and under a less stringent PADI program some years later.
The early years were spent diving the philippines and all the run of the mill dive destinations that it has to offer. We did Batangas, Puerto Galera, Cebu, Bohol, Palawan. We did this all as a family my brothers and sisters were certified the year after i was and my older cousins were already all divers by that time. Almost all the breaks from school were spent at diving locations and my mom always tried to make it a trip where we were all complete. I felt sorry for the DMs back then, if a DM was assigned to us most likely he would spend all his dive time chasing us waiting for us or just plain getting mad at us.
No one and i mean no one ever followed the DMs. Mom would just stop and spend whole dives just looking at one thing. Paolo and Carlo would take off at their own pace, and alexis would go head down swimming into the abyss; leaving the DM scratching his head wondering whom he should follow. I on the other hand would just hover close to my mother as from the beginning it was always my job to watch over her these early years really honed my underwater protective instinct and little did i know it would be training for the life i would eventually lead.
I tend to mention my mom a lot when talking about diving. This is because she was instrumental in my early training and early diving experiences. She would put me through things that I would never experience again throughout my diving career. Experiences extremely horrifying at the time but eventually giving me a solid understanding of boats, the ocean, and extreme weather conditions. Believe me she was not a skilled diver at all, she was just plain adventurous, if they said it couldn't be done the more she wanted to do it and she would. She had a relationship with the ocean that to this day i will never understand.
like all kids, as i entered early college life diving was forgotten we were too busy drinking with friends, hanging with our girl friends, or just plain lazy to pack our bags and go diving anymore. Mom lost interest too and i thought that would be the end...
Little did i know it would merely be, the end of the beginning...
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