How I became Aquaboy...

Part 5

When my mom was sick we didnt dive that much since we spent a lot of time with her in the hospital and at home. We had to close our dive shops in Bacolod and Ilo-ilo since the whole family moved to manila. With all the spare equipment lying around my dad decided to run the dive shop of Balai resort in Anilao. This was going to be a major thing for us. We purchased 120 tanks fixed up 4 compressors, bought weights and a whole lot of diving equipment.

When we started out it was me and my dad that were the compressor men. We would rent out gear, make out receipts and fill tanks. I think its safe to say that was the only time that a diver would be getting tanks from the compressor man that was wearing a rolex (my dad). After a while I was the one that did all of that while my dad was busy with other things. Id go to Anilao on a Friday and start filling tanks up, then saturday and sunday would be just work. I used to run the dive shop all by myself. Hard but fun work.

We got 3 guys to help out in the Dive shop after a while so wedecided to get the Nitrox filling station in Aquaventure resort as well. They would be in Balai while I would be in Aquaventure filling the nitrox for the guests.

My cousins Nathan and Alex Floro started bringing in Halcyon BC's when we used to live in Bacolod then they alsobecame the distributors as well here in the Philippines. They also borught in 2 of the instructors from Global Underwater Explorers or G.U.E. These guys held the world records for deepest penetration dives and they were also the ones that made the Halcyon BC's. This was the time I was introduced to the Doing It Right philosophy of diving. We did the Fundamentals of D.I.R then my cousins,dad and a few of their friends did Tech 1 which is a more demanding course. I remember this one time when we were loading the tanks with Helium and Oxygen the instructor saw the area where we were filling the tanks, he had to take a picture of it because there we were in this dark corner of the property standing on top of a table filling the tanks while reading analog gauges wherein the US they had digital gauges where you just enter the mix that you want and it automatically fills the tank, even with our cave man set-up the mixes still came out perfect.

It was while I was working in Balai that I saw my first frogfish. It was color black, I had never seen anything like that ever in my life. I even lost sight of it while I was going around the "manta" wreck of Balai, my companion had to point it out to me again since it was superbly camouflaged.