THRESHER SHARK DIVERS

¡Muy buena experiencia de buceo! Gracias a Toni por el buen trato y la vibra positiva, volveremos sin duda ????????

Firstly, the admin staff have been incredible and managed my transfer from Moalboal to Malapascua and from Malapascua to Cebu flawlessly. They were extremely helpful and responsive.

Having said that, the people in charge of the diveshop created a pretty negative experience, in my opinion. On my first day, someone named Alverto handled all my paperwork. He was incredibly pushy about me doing the Padi deep diver course, which he was going to run despite the fact that I wasn't interested in it at all.

On the first dive at Kimud Shoal ( the Thresher site), my buddy, whom they paired me with and seemed really inexperienced, used up his air extremely quickly. When the divemaster checked in with us, he was at 100 bar while I was at 170. The total dive time for this, including the 3 min safety stop, was 36 mins - my shortest dive yet! Instead of switching the buddies around, I did my second dive with the same buddy. Luckily, we bumped into another group of divers from the company right before our safety stop, and I was able to have a slightly longer dive.

Later, Leon, the manager, asked me how my dive was. When I told him about this, he said "well sometimes we don't know until we get them underwater." Now... Let me be clear, I'm a rescue diver, and objectively, that statement is accurate. Having said that, Thresher Shark divers are by far the most expensive company to dive with. I would think that the response should be at least a tinge apologetic.

I also asked Leon if they were planning any dives at Gato or if they would be doing the 3 dive schedule of Monad Shoal, Kimud Shoal, and Kimud Shoal. Leon then told me that based on the weather, it was unlikely that they would be able to go to those places but that he would "try to schedule Gato on my last day of diving."

As a result of this, I switched to Atlas divers, who I would recommend instead. I will admit, when I went with them to Gato, the weather wasn't great, and the sea was quite rough, but not something it made sense to cancel dives over. Given how stunning Gato is them being so uncomital about going there is enough reason for me not to recommend them.

The last point I'd like to make is about the sunset dive for Mandrian Fish at Lighthouse. If you book that with Thresher Shark Divers, a minimum of two divers are required before they will actually do the dive. With Atlas, however, I did it twice, and both times, it was just me and my divemaster.

After my experience with them, a part of me wonders if the replies from the shop to negative reviews are correct and if they really implement the suggested changes. I'd also like to mention that someone I became friends with from doing a shore dive with them through Thresher Shark Divers who had significantly more issues than me with them.

Highly recommend TSD if you want a seamless and fuss-free dive trip covering Malapascua, Bohol and Moalboal. Andrea helped to liaise with the various dive centres and arrange for the transportation for each location.

TSD dive masters were professional and friendly, especially Mark and Tata. The crew and office staff were also very helpful. All in all, it was a great experience diving in TSD, if you don’t have to deal with the Manager, Leon, who is not fantastic in managing the dives and also like to make sarcastic comments which were not funny.

On one of the days, we booked for 3 dives at 8.30am and 1 dive at 2.30pm. Due to unforeseen delays on the 1st trip out, we only managed to return to the dive shop at 2.35pm. When we were returning to the dive shop, we saw the other dive boat leaving for the 2.30pm dive. The poor dive master who was assigned to us, was left behind at the dive shop, waiting for us to arrange with Leon on the next steps. When we approached Leon, he only said “I had to ask the other boat to go” and “kindly” offered us other options, which was to go on the night dive or end the day earlier. As we had other plans for the night, we had no choice but to end the day earlier, and do a night dive the next day, one day before we were supposed to depart malapascua. As a result, we had to leave with wet gears the following day.

As the manager of the dive shop, the basic expectation is for him to manage the dives that the shop are offering. Based on the timings stated on the registration sheets, we were able to make it back in time for the 2.30pm dive. Of course, there were unexpected delays, but shouldn’t he be managing this and offering a solution to resolve the issue, instead of just brushing us off with existing dives which we know of and didn’t want to register?

Thankfully, the other staff in TSD were very professional and were able to compensate for Leon’s lack-of service.

Great dive center!
We were there for a week and felt completely at ease. Our guides Mark, Junjie, Wilbert and Tata were all great and did an excellent job.
The organization in advance and on site was also great.
The dives at Kimud Shoal were fantastic, as were the macro dives.
We can highly recommend this dive center and will come again :)

Very unpleasant experience here. The business runs good dives (hard to screw up when the idea is "drop to where the threshers are") but will charge extra for whatever they can. Never been nickel and dimed in the dozens of other dive shops around the world.