One of the more controversial tourist attractions in the Philippines is the whale shark experience in Oslob at the Southern tip of Cebu Island.
The main reason is that the local fishermen found that by attracting whale sharks with small fish they are more than willing to hang around and they can then charge tourists to swim with them. Which made them a lot more cash than fishing.
This has now become a very organised and lucrative business and tourists are charged around £20 for a 30 minute session to see and swim with the sharks.
So what is a typical session like. Well Hivers first of all everyone gets a short briefing session on how to swim with the sharks and not approach them within 3m or head on, you should not use flash photography, touch or chase them in the water. The down side is the sharks have not seen the lecture and will often come much closer and they seem much faster than you can get out of the way, you also have people who always ignore the rules anyway, which is one of the things used against Oslob as photos of people trying to hold the fins often crop up on the internet.
So after the talk you are taken down to the beach and given a mask, if you don’t have your own and a life jacket handy if you can’t swim. You then loaded 6 at time on to a small banker and paddled out to where the whale sharks are.
Once out in the bay and the bankers with tourists are lined up one of the fishermen will throw the small fish in the water and lead the Whale Sharks past the line of boats. As you can see it can get very busy and you’re only out there for about 30 minutes so over a morning it gets through a lot of people.
In general the sharks are much more interested in the fish than the people and do not seen bothered at all.
So what are the objections. Mostly that the sharks are being fed and it’s changing their feeding and migration habits, but this isn’t really the case. Study’s have found that there maybe one or two sharks that have taken up permanent residences but most hang around for a few free meals and then move on. The event only carries on till around noon anyway. Most of the objections seem to come from other whale shark tour areas anyway who see Oslob as taking business from them.
Personally I don’t have any real objection it does does allow people who would never normally see these magnificent animals in a natural environment and not an aquarium which for a migratory animal is often a death sentence.
True it is always nicer to have a natural encounter rather than an engineered one but most of the tourists in Oslob will never have the chance to do that. Having done both the buzz you get when seeing on of the big sharks when scuba diving is amazing and much better than Oslob but only a small percentage of people ever get to experience that so Hivers here is a photo of just that taken in Tubbataha.
