Talicud: Paradise not found on map

ISLAND GARDEN CITY OF SAMAL—Lounging on a chair inside the entertainment pavilion of Leticia by the Sea, its open air terrace on Talicud Island overlooking the Davao Gulf, Davao businessman Ray de la Paz suddenly turns animated as he talks about tiny creatures under the sea.

Opening the book “Coral Sea Reef Guide,” he shows the creature called nudibranch (sea slugs) and says, “The good thing about the nudibranch is that it is a host to other smaller sea creatures, so once you find it among the corals on the ocean floor, expect to see other sea critters nearby.”

Then, he thumbs through his iPad to show all the photographs of colorful critters he took with his point-and-shoot underwater camera. “It’s all about colors,” says De la Paz, who has been diving for decades, increasingly drawn by the rare creatures to the Davao Gulf.

He says one of his morning pleasures is to dive at 5 a.m. and simply ogle at tiny creatures underwater.

Lately, however, a different kind of creature, the type unwelcome in the pristine Talicud Island, has been threatening to change the picture: Garbage, tons of it coming from neighboring places.

“It was so clean, and the people were so good, but when more people started coming, the garbage followed,” he says, recalling how he fell in love with the place at first sight.

As garbage increasingly threatened to spoil the divers’ fun underwater, De la Paz decided to sponsor a divers’ cleanup drive, dubbed “scubasurero,” by the Davao Reef Divers Club in the Davao Gulf.

More than 30 scuba divers took part in the daylong activity in February, plunging themselves 62 feet underwater to retrieve all the garbage found floating in this part of the Davao Gulf.

“What we normally get are used diapers, plastic, even sanitary napkins,” says Blogie Robillo, the Davao Reef Divers Club head, who says the group has been conducting a  regular cleanup campaign in different parts of the Gulf once a month.

“These plastics are dangerous because sea turtles mistake them for jellyfishes, so they eat them and die,” he says.

But Robillo says the scubasurero campaign can’t be sufficient to clean up the entire ocean floor increasingly flooded by garbage coming from neighboring cities. “It’s sad because what we’re cleaning is only just a small part of the vastness of the gulf, where garbage is thrown every day,” he says.

“What we are doing is only to make people more conscious about what they do to the environment,” Robillo says.

Fidencio Matro, the Sta. Cruz village chair, says the cleanup drive is a boost to community livelihood because some pieces of garbage are stuck on the ocean floor and destroy corals and remove fish habitat.

“When the water is dirty, the corals get destroyed and the fish could not lay their eggs,” Matro says. “This, to a large extent, affects fish production,” he adds.

Most of the garbage, he says, comes from Davao City or other resorts lining the beaches of Samal Island. “You can see it after the floods,” Matro says.

De la Paz says divers decided to put the campaign together to make people aware of the riches of the sea and be motivated toward protecting these. Most important, he says, was that people should pay attention to Talicud Island, which has one of the most beautiful diving sites in the world.

The government has also not paid attention to Talicud, he says.

“There’s no Samal Island without Talicud because it’s here where you find water so clean, the air so fresh and the people, so good,” De la Paz says.

Talicud Island, he says, was never put on the map of Davao because when authorities talk about it, they think only of Samal.

“Our Talicud Island is a very strategic place because it’s near the tip of Samal where there’s a mushroom rock, Panggubatan, one of the best diving spots in the country,” he says.

He says he has been diving in other parts of the world but has not seen anything as beautiful as Talicud Island.

He says the first time he saw the place about 10 years ago, he easily fell in love with it. The family resort, Leticia by the Sea, started out as a family getaway before they developed it and offered it two years ago to people looking for a place to stay on weekends.

Now, it is perfect for family gatherings and corporate events, says de la Paz’s wife, Leticia, after whom the resort was named.

“Most of the plants were planted by us,” she says.

De la Paz says because of its proximity to world-class diving sites, Leticia by the Sea is very strategic for divers.

He says it was in Talicud Island, where he learned to appreciate the simple things in life. He sleeps hearing the sound of crickets and wakes up to the chirping of birds.

“You will know it’s morning when the crickets are gone,” he says. Between 5 a.m. to 6 a.m., he takes a dive to see the undersea creatures. He says he never knew life can be so good.