OP
manhattandiver
Contributor
divefoxx:
I respect the fact that others on this board have different views on the grounding. I certainly would not insult them or call anything they have to say "crap". Despite divefoxx's assertions, not one, but two tow ropes broke. Furthermore, one of the Stella Maris' guests did have her dive gear destroyed when the first tow rope broke and swept across the dive deck. When the second tow rope broke, it did not fall harmlessly into the water, but whipped so loudly against the stern decks of the Oceanic Explorer that we could hear it on the Stella Maris Explorer over fifty meters away. Everyone I was with at the time was shocked to hear that people on the Oceanic Explorer were NOT injured.
Though I can't speak to divefoxx's own experience, all of the guests on the Eco Explorer that I talked to stated that no alarm bells went off at the time of the collision and that the crew did not alert those passengers who were sleeping. They also informed me that the ship was moving at high speed when it went aground. If it was moving at only 3-5 knots, as divefoxx claims, I doubt that it could have slid so completely onto the reef that it could not have been pulled off at high tide, with the assistance of two other ships of comperable size and after having dumped nearly 30 tons of water from its hold. Perhaps I am missing something.
While the crew of the Stella Maris Explorer did do everything they could to make the trip enjoyable, the Stella Maris' captain was negligent in the way that he handled the salvage operation. First, as I noted in my original post, had it not been for the actions of one of the ship's guests, the Stella Maris itself would have run aground. Second, in what I can only describe as a scene from a bad comedy, at one point the captains of the Oceanic Explorer and the Stella Maris Explorer decided to line their ships up to pull on the Eco Explorer in single file, separated by no more than 10 meters from bow to stern. Had the Ocenaic Explorer's tow rope broken at that point instead of shortly later, that ship would have rammed at full power into the stern of the Stella Maris Explorer. I can't even imagine the damage it might have caused.
I agree with dive addict that the boat crews did their best to make guests feel as comfortable as possible after the incident. However, I cannot say the same thing of either the Stella Maris' captain or its head divemaster, Allen. While the inconvenience to guests on the Stella Maris Explorer pales in comparison to those on the Eco Explorer, the experience was far from pleasant. Overcrowding, oil and diesel smoke billowing onto the decks and into the cabins (as the Stella Maris ran its engines at full power while trying to tow the Eco Explorer off of the reef), and a day spent diving the mediocre, no-name sites near the Eco Explorer (instead of the better sites we were supposed to dive that day at the northern end of Tubbataha South), are just a few.
Despite the above, neither the captain nor Allen ever apologized for the incident. The latter even got angry when I and another guest insisted on doing all of the dives we had paid for on the last day of our trip! Purely out of spite, Allen then limited our dives that day to a maximum depth of 20 meters and a maximum bottom time of 35 minutes, despite the fact that we had paid extra to dive Nitrox. To cap it all off, after my group saw a manta ray at the end of our first dive on the last day and I signaled to the others that I was going to stay down a few minutes longer to take pictures, Allen later berated me in public for "disobeying my divemaster" and threatened to ground me for the next dive! I flew halfway around the world to dive with a manta ray, not to be scolded like a child.
I have written these posts as a service to other divers on this board, to alert them to what I consider a dangerous operation. I have also written them in response to what I see as a suspicious lack of attention paid to this matter by the Philippine media. To clarify, I am not interested in compensation from Cruise Island Adventure / Scuba World. What's done is done. Though divefoxx may think that Cruise Island Adventure / Scuba World were generous in offering free return trips to Eco Explorer passengers, had I been on that ship I would have turned them down cold. Why would anyone who went through an ordeal like that want to repeat the experience with the same operator who put them in danger in the first place?
The fact remains that the owners and captain of the Eco Explorer ran their ship aground in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The fact also remains that this is the third ship in the Explorer fleet to have been involved in such an accident. Setting aside divergant views on the details, the above speak for themselves. The Eco Explorer did not graze the reef, it ran straight into it. This is the very definition of negligence. The fact that this is also part of a pattern of behavior by Curise Island Adventure / Scuba World, indicates that those entities are also negligent in hiring incompetent captains for their ships.
