Romancing the reefs with trouble in paradise
By Alya B. Honasan
You never forget your first shark. It was 1989, and I was a relatively new scuba diver on my first weeklong dive trip to Tubbataha Reefs in the Sulu Sea. It was a perfectly clear summer’s day, and I had barely righted myself after nervously back-rolling into the ocean from the rubber dinghy that ferried divers from the big boat to the dive site, when I saw it—a beautiful 6-foot white tip reef shark with beady eyes, undulating gills and the most graceful movements I had ever seen in an animal.
