Search it on Google first. Then go to DAN and request the information they did a few years ago. However, It may be published somewhere on the internet by now.
RSTCS is really to blame as they set a bare minimum of standards and then the rest of the ABC organizations follow.
“Hands off is a given when diving with me. There is a difference between organizer and leader. However, unfortunately I have seen pictures where divers on trips I organized have touched marine life. Never any excuse for that…but do have to say that in the picture the diver that was touching marine life was a diver trained by a very famous PADI foreign instructor in Kaohsuing that has been preaching don’t touch marine life. It is hard to control an entire group of trained, independent divers in the water.”
I agree there is a difference between leading a dive and organizing one. Generally speaking when I lead a dive I am probably teaching skills, whereas when I organise one like I did just recently with 15 divers over to Orchid Island I am just part of the group and I allow the DM’s I hire, to lead the group, and I am sort of a roaming safety officer just keeping an eye on things generally, when not taking photographs. However I will say that when I organise a dive all the divers are aware of my feelings on molesting marine life, harrassing turtles, poking corals, fondling anenomes, collecting shells or fish feeding. If I were to notice one of the divers on my trip doing any of the above I would quietly take them aside and explain my point of view and reasons. If they refused or continued to abuse the marine life I certainly would not invite them to dive with me again. I would also suggest the the ‘famous foreign instructor’ you mentioned only had that diver in his charge for 5 confined water dives in a pool and 4 training dives in the ocean. Enough time to suggest but not instill sound environmental diving principles. As they say ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink’. I would suggest that it is who this diver dived with frequently afterwards and gained diving experience with who would have the greatest influence on their responsible diving practises or lack of them. I believe that was with a foreign dive instructor living in Tainan. I think that the diver[s] in questions must easily have a had a couple of dozen dives with that instructor 
Greetings Fellow Underwater Explorers!
Great to read this thread and get some pointers on diving in Taiwan! I’m just moving to Taipei this week to study Mandarin and look forward to spending all my pastime checking out all the sights and scenes above and below water. Orchid island sounds great, and I’m also tempted to check out the Kenting national park, not to mention venturing out to Okinawa and the Philippines for extended weekend trips. I’m a DM and recently also completed the DSAT Tec Deep. If any of you know of trips for beginner tec divers, I’d be most interested (DSAT and TDI both work for me). I’m also interested in the trimix course and cave diving. After visiting the Yucatan cenotes I definitely want to take the NACD Full Cave course, should any of you know a certified instructor in Taiwan. Have a great week and great dives! Cheers, Matt
[quote=“Hermit”]Greetings Fellow Underwater Explorers!
Great to read this thread and get some pointers on diving in Taiwan! I’m just moving to Taipei this week to study Mandarin and look forward to spending all my pastime checking out all the sights and scenes above and below water. Orchid island sounds great, and I’m also tempted to check out the Kending national park, not to mention venturing out to Okinawa and the Philippines for extended weekend trips. I’m a DM and recently also completed the DSAT Tec Deep. If any of you know of trips for beginner tec divers, I’d be most interested (DSAT and TDI both work for me). I’m also interested in the trimix course and cave diving. After visiting the Yucatan cenotes I definitely want to take the NACD Full Cave course, should any of you know a certified instructor in Taiwan. Have a great week and great dives! Cheers, Matt[/quote]
Hi welcome to Taiwan, there is great diving here. If you are based out of Taipei I would recommend getting in touch with McGill Cheng he is a PADI CD in Taipei and specializes in tech diving, you can contact him at info@divebuddy.com He organisers trips.
Green Island also has a great tech diving instructor who specializes in nitox, trimix plus semi-closed and closed circuit rebreather systems. His name is Sunny Cheng everyone knows him on Green but if you want a number for him I will try and dig one up for you, just PM me.
If you want to get wet down in Kenting drop me a line or PM me.
Cheers and safe diving.
Can all the instructors just stop pointing fingers please? It’s getting a bit annoying. To set things straight: I’m the diver in question. I did not molest the sea creatures. Another diver in my group picked up the sea cucumber and just handed it over to me where I put it back on the ground AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! I did not ask to hold the F**** thing!!! That’s when another diver in our group took that picture. And to go around and saying that my instructor lets his students molest marine life, is very very rude.
I like spearfishing. Where can I do that in Taiwan? Not with tanks, just wetsuit and snorkel. I had some magic fun with barracuda and trevallys in Thailand last year, but its a bit far to go. Fishing, beachside BBQ, beer. Don’t get much better than that!
Sandman has a point.
If you are diving in a non-protected area, where spearfishing is legal, and you only do it for your own use, what’s the damage in taking a fish for your barbecue?
After all, the main danger to the worlds sealife is not a scuba diver catching a big ass octopus, it’s the trawlers emptying the sea at every given turn, along with the sports fishers throwing their hooks everywhere.
Where I come from, the sports divers associations have special chapters for free divers diving in order to spear a cod or a herring. They even brag about it.
Danish bad cheese-eater, I’m not trying to make a point – I love spearfishing and I’m bloody not bad at it, either. Or used to be a long time ago, at least. Yes, we used to go after cod sometimes but more usually it would be sea bass because at that time the only way to eat a sea bass was to either catch it with a fishing rod or spear it in the kelp beds – you never really saw them for sale in those days.
A lot of flatfish-spearing over sand, as well. Turbot, baby, turbot! And we used to dive with “cleeks” to winkle out lobsters and crabs from under the rocks. And a net bag to keep any scallops we’d come across. Undersea shenanigans with a purpose!
You need a license for a speargun here…And I’m with you on spearfishing while breathholding. Only problem is the bigger stuff tends to live deep and is as a rule very skittish. You’d need to be able to hit at least 15meters up North to get deep enough to hit anything worth taking home, unless your quarry is something like an octopus.
When I first started diving here Cuttlefish used to congregate up north during winter months in reasonable numbers in a bay just east of Yehliu. We’d get out there and nail 5 or six a day. Needless to say, between me and the locals we thoroughly managed to decimate the population until they no longer appeared…Note I have not seen a cuttlefish in NE Taiwan for over 8 years. 
I’ve seen populations of everything in serious decline in Taiwan’s waters over the last 2 decades. The first time I dove Kenting, I saw a Napolean Wrasse right next to the Nuclear power plant outlet, the bay was also a breeding area for the banded Sea Krait, and in generations before mine, Whale sharks moved freely both in the bay, in the waters around Penghu and up the Kurushio current on the east coast. I’ve seen white-tip reef sharks on Green island in 8meters of water.
I don’t think I could ever again take a speargun into the local oceans and justify it…There is so little left, and my own contributions, despite selective hunting, make me feel less than proud.
I just came back from Orchid Island, where the diving was fantastic. But even there, the upper food chain ocean Arnolds are either totally absent, or so skittish they only tantalize you with their presence on the very edge of visibility.
And finally Sherryx…Sea cucumbers are pretty resilient, so your guilt factor need not be too high. Many of the species can empty out their entire digestive track and then regenerate.
You got caught up in something entirely different…Where one group thinks they are superior to another because they advocate a certain method of underwater training. It’s wank…Just ignore it, and enjoy the dives.
My, my feeling a little paranoid are we? In actual fact I was not think about you at all handling the sea cucumber. In my original post [not here] I was just warning all the divers in your group that sea cucumbers exude a highly toxic poison from their skin when irritated and touching them can cause the sea cucumber to do just that. The toxin may cause a virulent skin irritatation and possible blindness if you were to rub yours eyes on the surface. Personally speaking if anyone handed me a sea cucumber to look at I would point to the sand and indicate he put it back where he found it. No, I was thinking about the various photos circulating of divers feeding Moray eels, feeding a giant grouper and other fish in general, handling or harrassing a turtle and puffing up a Pufferfish so that some one could take a picture of it. I regard all this as irresponsible behaviour by divers. Feeding the moray and the grouper was particulary foolish as those fish could do some serious damage to the feeders hand. As MJB said sea cucumbers are pretty resilient animals you probably did not cause it any harm.
I think that the marine environment in Taiwan is under threat and that as divers we should act responsibly and set a good example to the other divers who do not. There are far fewer fish swimming around then there were 20 years ago when I started diving in Taiwan. Although the poster above is correct when he says that it is likely not individual spear fishermen taking one or two fish for dinner that is wiping out species. I would certainly not support spearfishing in Taiwan, especially in areas that should be made into marine parks such as Orchid Island, Green Island, Kenting, Xiau Liu Chou and certain areas in the NE of Taiwan. Spear fishing on scuba is for a start very unsporting, like shooting fish in a barrel, and it should be banned in areas where recreational divers dive to take photos and fun dive. Perhaps if you were using a hawaiian sling and free diving OK, but not in an area where there exist less than 20% of the fish species and numbers of fish that there ought to be on a healthy reef… However IMO the whole idea of hunting for trophy fish or animals on land is outdated and immoral. Why would anyone want to kill the biggest of anything for fun nowadays? Hunting for food by indigenous tribes and folk too poor to buy food elsewhere OK. I believe that killing the largest, most successful of any species continually over a long period of time, leads to degradation of that species. Deliberate targeting of the largest of any species denigrates the gene pool of that species leading to smaller, weaker animals. How many times have I heard fishermen complain the the area used to be full of large groupers and giant morays and teemed with jacks, tuna, turtles and other species. Nowadays seeing a group of 3 or 400 Bannerfish or snapper is a rare event when once it was common, I often saw 4 or 5 octopus and cuttlefish on one dive now I consider myself lucky if I see one. How many times have you heard hunters complain that there are no huge animals left to hunt? The situation in Kenting, Orchid, and Green Islands is reaching the tipping point and if the government does not wake up and take action to conserve the marine life in those areas, there will not be any fish left to see and scuba divers, fishermen, snorkelers etc will stop going to these places and the people living there will face the consequences. Dive and snorkel responsibly, take only pictures and memories, leave only bubbles. Have fun and safe diving.
That sounds good. Because then when my kid’s old enough to fire a speargun there’ll fish for him to aim at.
I agree that the sport scuba guys should be curtailed wherever possible. If it weren’t for those guys there would be LOADS of places to spearfish. Take only pics, leave only bubbles? Jesus! What we are talking about here is human encroachement, nothing more, nothing less. It’s THAT that destroys ecosystems. When I was a lad, hardly ANYONE went diving apart from spearfishers. There was always plenty of quarry. It wasn’t until the Toms Dicks and Harrys started showing up with their tanks, SUVs, strobes, et al that the fish stocks declined.
Yeah, those sport divers should leave stuff the fuck alone because there are thousands and thousands of them, as opposed to a few dozen proper fishermen and divers. I fished the same places year in, year out, for several decades, and every year there were fish. It wasn’t until the scuba guys started showing up in the early 70s that stocks began declining. Wasn’t because they were fishing places out, it was purely because they were THERE.
That sounds good. Because then when my kid’s old enough to fire a speargun there’ll fish for him to aim at.
I agree that the sport scuba guys should be curtailed wherever possible. If it weren’t for those guys there would be LOADS of places to spearfish. Take only pics, leave only bubbles? Jesus! What we are talking about here is human encroachement, nothing more, nothing less. It’s THAT that destroys ecosystems. When I was a lad, hardly ANYONE went diving apart from spearfishers. There was always plenty of quarry. It wasn’t until the Toms Dicks and Harrys started showing up with their tanks, SUVs, strobes, et al that the fish stocks declined.
Yeah, those sport divers should leave stuff the fuck alone because there are thousands and thousands of them, as opposed to a few dozen proper fishermen and divers. I fished the same places year in, year out, for several decades, and every year there were fish. It wasn’t until the scuba guys started showing up in the early 70s that stocks began declining. Wasn’t because they were fishing places out, it was purely because they were THERE.[/quote]
LOL.
Hi divers…
Does anyone know about any diving happening in and around the Taipei area?
I recently bought some diving equipment, have an advanced open water cert, but don’t know of any trips or regular club fixtures involving diving.
Is it possible to simply take a bus up to Keelung and go diving on the weekend?
Help me out…I’m all dressed up (so to speak) and nowhere to go!!!
John.
Does anyone know of any OWD courses in Taichung which may be starting in the next month or so, that two people can join? I’ve looked at one place, and they won’t have classes until September, and I’m wanting to start sooner.
Thanks!
[quote=“jamesara”]Does anyone know of any OWD courses in Taichung which may be starting in the next month or so, that two people can join? I’ve looked at one place, and they won’t have classes until September, and I’m wanting to start sooner.
Thanks![/quote]
I can do it anytime. PM sent
Hi, Yep I can teach you the PADI Open water course within your time frame. Typhoon weather conditions permitting of course All my training takes place in the Kenting area.
Please drop me a line at divingintaiwan@yahoo.com or PM me for more information.
Cheers.
[quote=“jamesara”]Does anyone know of any OWD courses in Taichung which may be starting in the next month or so, that two people can join? I’ve looked at one place, and they won’t have classes until September, and I’m wanting to start sooner.
Thanks![/quote]
If any divers are interested in a small trip to Green Island Jul31 to Aug2 please contact me. I got a couple spots left. See shellbackdiver.com/green_isl … index.html for details.
I’m studying in Taipei for this semester, and me and 3 other guys from school would like to go to Green Island to do some diving.
None of us have tried diving before so we want to get us a license, preferably PADI, since it seems like the “real deal”.
I have tried searching these forums and google aswell, but all reports I find are from seasoned divers. We want to do it soon’ish, maybe from October 8-11th, if its possible with short notice.
Hope you guys can help!