(Second of two-part series)
Federico “Piki” Lopez, chairman and chief executive of listed First Philippine Holdings Corp. (FPH) and a third-generation top-level manager of the family-owned conglomerates, professes that he felt so at home in the water world.
“I grew up a competitive swimmer and my dearth of academic honors was way compensated for by the profusion of competitive swimming medals and records broken,” Lopez said in a speech before the Management Association of the Philippines after accepting the Management Man of the Year Award in 2020.
“Water was always my element which later translated to a love for the sea. I ruefully admit though that in my earlier days as a scuba diver, I was also an avid spear fisherman, and we’d justify this by claiming that we’d spear only what we’d eat,” he said.
He vividly recalled, in the same speech, his incredible experiences with notoriously ferocious man-eaters of the oceans but amazingly were not on a feeding frenzy at the time.
He narrated that while spearfishing off the Verde Island Passage in Batangas, a 14-foot hammerhead shark came dangerously close to him.
“Fortunately, I wasn’t on this shark’s menu and had no bloodied fish to defend against this gigantic predator, so he casually departed after deciding we had nothing exciting to offer,” Lopez recounted.
The close encounter, however, left him with an indelible lesson that even the giants of the deep can also be gentle and harmless unless provoked.
“The sight of something this magnificent, this powerful, and this beautiful, my steel-shaft speargun didn’t only feel like a toothpick pointing at an armored tank but also that it didn’t belong there,” he said.
“I retired the speargun forever after that dive and exchanged it for an underwater camera instead,” he added.
According to Lopez, his succeeding years underwater spent with a special camera brought him even closer to the sea with which he had developed a passionate attachment.
Another episode brought Lopez eyeball-to-eyeball with an equally huge tiger shark during a dive in Fiji.
“There were initially only two of us divers underwater when this monster-sized shark began circling and his very presence warded off all the other Bull sharks, Gray Reef sharks, Nurse sharks, Whitetip and Blacktip sharks that had been with us the previous four days,” he recounted.
“But what I found in that cageless encounter with a shark, infamously branded among the three most responsible for attacks on humans, was something completely different from what I had expected,” he told his audience at the MAP.
“He was never menacing nor terrifying, but more cautious, gentle and even playful. As he directly approached me for the first time, I could feel his nose glide gently just a foot or so above my head, sort of playing with the bubbles rising from my regulator. Instinctively, I gently lifted my gloved fingers to touch his underbelly as he passed by.”
“I never had shark’s fin soup ever again,” he said.
“I wrote an article about that encounter which became a magazine cover a few months later,” he said.
