Uncle Benny

60

IT services (retired)

Diving since 2000

• Well it all began when I was a teenager. I was always attracted to the sea, spent a lot of holidays on the beach with family and when I got old enough to go on trips of my own I started snorkelling. Islands off Johor especially, in those days it was Pulau Rawa, Pulau Tioman. Those were probably in the early 80s, when diving was just too expensive for the common man on the street to get involved, but snorkelling was cheap. A pair of fins, a snorkel and a mask. So I started snorkelling for many years, with the intention to go into diving eventually.

  
  

• I didn’t start diving until I was in my late thirties.

  
  

• There were a lot of memorable moments but the one that stuck in my mind was when I was lost at sea for about four hours. I drifted out into the Indian ocean off Phuket and was rescued about four hours later. If you ask me, that is the one that will stick to my mind all my life.

  
  

• Because of my affinity for the sea, I brought them to a lot of snorkelling trips as school kids. We would snorkel off the Malaysian islands. And they were all natural in the water, so they were jumping off the boat without life jackets and swimming around, having a ball of a time.

  
  

• I think the ocean has to be treated with respect, because I have seen all kinds of weather conditions while out on the dive boat. I have also been in a dive boat that capsized in rough seas, on top of the lost-at-sea incident. And diving has in a way motivated me to keep fit, because I look forward to the two or three or four diving trips a year. And diving is something if you’re not fit, for example if you’re a smoker, you would run out of air usually much faster than a non-smoker. And if you don’t have some minimum level of physical fitness your breathing rate will be higher and you will still run out of air. So basically for us senior divers, we usually don’t smoke so that we can maximise our air and bottom time.

  
  

• I think my favourite part of dive trips is not what you see down there. I think what you see down there is the bonus. The favourite part is the dive itself. When you are diving you must have 100% full mental concentration. That means it’s chilling out extreme. You don’t think about work, you don’t think about email, you don’t think about family, you don’t think about anything. Your mind is totally focused, and that to me is therapeutic. What you see and the friends around you, and the experience you have before the dive, after the dive, the social part of it is the bonus. But you are in your own world when you are diving. Your senses are sharp, you look out for trouble, you look after your buddy - or your family member, depending on the situation. So to me it’s 100% full concentration. You have no choice. You cannot dive when you have a troubled mind, or you have something disturbing you. You can’t.

  
  

• The ideal place would be somewhere you can dive without planning for weeks. Just go for a dive like you would go for a bicycle ride around the neighborhood.

  
  

• This is a sad part of our history. I remember when I was in secondary school - that would have been in the mid-seventies. I used to go to my uncle’s flat at Marine Parade. Block 7. At those days there was no ECP. His lift lobby was about 30m from the beach. I used to walk down to the beach. It was Tioman, I am not exaggerating. The water was as clear as Tioman. There were reefs at low tide that were knee-deep in water. So I used to stand knee-deep, used a handline to catch edible fish and that reef stretched all the way from Tanjong Katong all the way to Changi Point. In hindsight, when we developed the ECP for economic reasons we destroyed that beautiful piece of paradise all the way from Tanjong Katong all the way North. It was not Singapore’s busiest port in the world that destroyed it, it was reclamation. ECP was put over that whole stretch of reef, end to end. Imagine today if we did not do that, or we had chosen the more expensive option of putting the ECP on stilts as what they did in the Florida Keys. A few years after construction the reefs would have settled down... Can you imagine if we had Tioman-like reefs five minutes out of the city today? I cannot even imagine what it would be like if people came here to do business, as what we would like, and then have the chance to go diving ten minutes away. Notwithstanding that our port has to be kept very clean. And that is very possible, I have visited ports before in really first-world countries where you don’t even see a cigarette butt or a cigarette box floating in the harbor waters. It can be done, to have ecology side by side with business, but we chose the third world approach, unfortunately. You can quote me on that. So this is what Singapore lost its heritage. We had it, we lost it. Don’t talk about Pulau Hantu, Pulau Semakau, all that. Up to today I have consciously chosen not to dive in any of those places. I have been there on a boat, I’ve looked down. You can’t even see your toes. So, we lost it. We could have been a world-class diving destination had we not built the ECP over it.