How I became Aquaboy...

PART 1

I started diving when I was about 11 years old. My dad's a Dive Instructor so that kinda meant that I would have to learn how to dive as well. I had tried scuba diving before when I was younger, I remember those dive trips my dad would go on in Cebu, all the kids of my dads friends would all be on the boat as well and we would wait for our parents to start their deco stop at around 10ft. So what I would do is dive down and grab my dads spare regulator and we would cruise around the reef for a few minutes, that was a trip for me back then.

At a very young age my Mom and Dad already introduced me to the water. I have pictures that my mom took, me in the water when I was about a month old in our old beach house is Nasugbu. They also used to take me to the country club in Alabang to learn how to swim and get used to the water.

You can say I was a beach kid back then. During weekends we would get into the old Uichico coaster and head to Nasugbu with my ninang Wendy, Ninang Wni and my other cousins. Wed use old pieces of driftwood as floaters and race one another. It's wonderful when you are a child, you are genuinely happy and content with the simplest things and you are content.

The fishermen used to throw fishing nets by the shore and when the time came to pull up the nets I would be there helping them out, back then they used to catch a whole lot of fish just by the shore. After we pulled the net up they would give me a few fish to take home and I would be super happy and run home to give the fish to the cook to fry or grill.

When I was around 4 or 5 we moved to Cebu for my dad's business, we first rented a house in Cebu City where we stayed for a few years, then my mom built her dream home by the sea. The place was called Punta Engano in Mactan Island, people used to tell my Mom and Dad that they were crazy for building a house there coz no one lived there and that it was so far from the city. Me, my bro and sis would go there during weekends while it was being built and just freely roam around the construction site and the property. The end of the land was a cliff which led straight to the water, so one of the first things my mom built was stairs going down so we could swim anytime we wanted to.

You know how some people are traumatized after something bad happens to them, well something traumatizing happened to me and water while we were living in Cebu. We had just went boating with a Japanese family that was also living in Cebu at that time. It was me, my mom, the Japanese lady and her daughter and the boatman in a small rubber dinghy heading back to shore when a wave capsized the boat. I was underwater I think for about 5 seconds when I got up I was crying and scared but I kept calm and started swimming as fast as I could back to the bigger boat. You could say I nearly drowned that day.