Jiangjun'ao, Penghu — a second-tier outlying island of Taiwan that requires an additional ferry transfer from Magong to reach. At its peak the island was home to 8,000 residents, complete with a hospital, schools, and government offices, earning it the nickname "Little Hong Kong." But as the island's primary fishing methods shifted, the population fell to less than one-tenth of that golden era. It's the kind of island most Taiwanese will never set foot on in their lifetime — yet Jiangjun'ao is steadily gaining recognition for one thing: Island77's dive trips to the Southern Four Islands National Park.
The "town centre" of Jiangjun'ao is delightfully unhurried
Islanders still use a rather unique method to transport daily necessities and luggage
Island77 and the Southern Four Islands
Island77 is arguably the most well-known dive shop in Taiwan in recent years. Beyond the obvious advantage of its location for running dive trips into the Southern Four Islands National Park, much of its fame is owed to the tireless efforts of the man behind the scenes — Ye Sheng-Hong. But what led him to put down roots in Jiangjun'ao and champion dive tourism?
Ye Sheng-Hong is a born-and-bred son of Jiangjun'ao. Like everyone on the island, he grew up following his elders into a fisherman's life of wrestling a livelihood from the sea — the ocean is simply in his blood. After completing his secondary and university education on the Taiwan mainland and finishing his military service, he returned to Jiangjun'ao and joined the family fishing operation. Their preferred methods weren't the more common longline or trawl fishing, but rather the far more controversial practices of electrofishing and scuba-assisted spearfishing (editor's note: hunting fish while carrying a scuba tank, sometimes called "tube-biting fishing" in local slang).
Spearfishing was once Ye Sheng-Hong's primary source of income
After leaving the military, he spent a full ten years as a spearfisherman, logging more than 10,000 scuba tank dives — and because night hunting was the most productive, as many as 7,000 of those dives were solo night dives. Running through 8 tanks and spending more than 8 hours at sea in a single day was routine, something virtually unimaginable to the average recreational diver. Penghu sits astride a branch of the Kuroshio Current, which keeps migratory fish stocks reliably abundant; a good day's work could yield over 120 kg of catch and a monthly income exceeding NT$200,000. Back then, he thought recreational diving was nothing more than going underwater to look at fish, and he simply couldn't understand the point of it.
By the end of my spearfishing days, all I had to do was see a fish swim past underwater and I could tell you exactly what species it was!
Spearfishing also led Ye Sheng-Hong to a deeper understanding of life
The Road from Spearfishing to the Dive Industry
With returns that lucrative, why would anyone want to change course? The turning point, as it turned out, came down to a single octopus — and a bout of decompression sickness (DCS).
Four years ago, during one dive, Ye Sheng-Hong was at 30 m depth stalking a large octopus. His speargun shot went wide and failed to finish the animal cleanly. In an extraordinary reversal, the octopus climbed up the speargun line and latched onto his face, ripping off his second stage regulator and mask in one go. Stranded underwater with no air supply, his life flashed before his eyes. After swallowing a few mouthfuls of seawater he remembered that the regulator was still tethered to him by a line; he followed the line back to his regulator and mask, then ascended slowly to the surface. It was the first time he had ever truly felt his life was in danger.
But the experience that finally convinced him to change careers was decompression sickness (DCS) — the affliction every diver dreads. That night, after completing the third planned tank of a dive session, he noticed he had developed symptoms of pneumomediastinum (a cough). He reasoned that if he kept the fourth tank shallow, he could descend again and help his body off-gas more nitrogen (editor's note: at greater depth, the efficiency of nitrogen absorption and elimination from scuba tank gas increases; if the body's nitrogen concentration at that point exceeds the 79% found in ambient air, this can accelerate off-gassing back to normal levels). What he didn't count on was the current sweeping him deeper, and a sudden eruption of fish all around him made him ignore the DCS risk entirely — he pressed on to even greater depths to continue spearing. When he climbed out of the water and peeled off his wetsuit back on shore, his skin was covered in Cutis marmorata (marbled skin mottling). On the emergency boat ride to Magong for hyperbaric chamber treatment, the appearance of blood in his urine and stool made his family realize just how serious this was. That harrowing experience made him understand: it would be a real shame if this is how my life ends.
After those two close calls, he resolved to put down his speargun and enter the sustainable tourism industry. He used the savings accumulated from a decade of spearfishing to launch a snorkeling operation. Then, determined to invest properly in scuba diving, he travelled to places like the Red Sea in Egypt — despite not being a dive instructor — to study dive resorts and liveaboards firsthand, absorbing the experience of international operations and folding those lessons into his own management philosophy. His obsession with doing things right shows up in the smallest details. He noted, for example, that the bench height on European dive boats is 65 cm, Southeast Asian boats typically use 55 cm, but the dive boat he built in 2017 — the Legend — has benches set at 42 cm. The reasoning: Taiwanese guests aren't as tall as Europeans or Americans, and his clientele, unlike Southeast Asian dive operators, rarely includes foreign visitors. He designed the bench height so that an average East Asian woman standing 160 cm tall can comfortably swing a scuba tank onto her back without strain. The boat is full of such thoughtful touches, each one a quiet expression of how much he cares about his guests.
Every Island77 dive boat is built with painstaking care
He also has his own distinctive approach to running a dive business. Contracted instructors receive a guaranteed base salary year-round plus commission, which keeps staff turnover low. He pioneered a tipping system — the first of its kind in Taiwan — so that guests diving here can enjoy the kind of top-tier service normally associated with Southeast Asia, while also letting instructors and shop staff share in the business's growth. His goal throughout is to cultivate a sense of genuine buy-in among his team, because exceptional service, he believes, can only be built on a foundation of passionate people.
A team that truly cares is the only way to deliver great service
After getting into the dive business, he discovered that chasing a specific creature on a recreational dive is just the destination — what really matters is savouring the journey and the joy of meeting new people along the way.
On the topic of fishing-village transformation that divers so often talk about, he is candid about how discouraging the reality is. He considers himself fortunate to have had the chance to leave home, see a wider world, absorb different ways of thinking, and then return to invest in that change. But asking a fisherman who has spent an entire lifetime at sea to abandon everything he knows and throw himself into a completely different industry — that's an enormous ask. He gives the example of government licensing requirements: a dive guide needs a Divemaster (PADI cert) certification; operating a commercial passenger vessel requires a small-boat licence. For fishermen who can barely write the Chinese characters for their own trade, these hurdles are nearly insurmountable. Speaking from a perspective that straddles both the recreational dive industry and the fishing community, he urges divers not to take for granted what seems obvious to them — for most fishermen, it simply isn't.
Island77 will not stay at its current scale forever, nor will it ever be the only dive shop running trips to the Southern Four Islands. Ye Sheng-Hong's dream is to one day operate his own dive resort, because the combination of high-quality service and the steadily recovering underwater ecosystem of the Southern Four Islands is enough to sustain what is, for Penghu, an entirely new industry. As for competition from other operators, he actively welcomes it. He freely shares his dive site maps — coordinates and all — hoping to inspire others to join in and grow the market together. Only then, he believes, does Taiwan's dive industry have a real chance to rise.
Dive guests who travelled all the way from Belgium. Taking the Southern Four Islands to the world is Ye Sheng-Hong's current life mission.
Island77's dive groups are now fully booked a year in advance — a seemingly triumphant start, though as always, the devil is in the details. Beyond his exacting standards for dive boat specifications and shop operations, Ye Sheng-Hong's insistence on full legal compliance is equally worth noting: registering as a licensed water recreation company, obtaining a commercial passenger vessel licence, ensuring the skipper holds the required certification, securing all relevant insurance, and so on. The accumulated fees and paperwork quietly add up to significant overhead — but because he held firm to those standards from day one, when the Southern Four Islands National Park opened its dive permit application process and required operators to produce a full suite of documentation, Island77 had every single document ready. It was, in the end, the natural outcome of years of preparation, and it cemented Island77 as the go-to name for Southern Four Islands dive trips.
Compared with other dive destinations in Taiwan, Penghu has a relatively short dive season. Stripping out typhoon disruptions, the window from April to September yields only around 140 operating days per year. With most people writing the idea off, he chose to take Island77's first step on the outlying island where he was born. There are no shortcuts to success — it is built layer by layer from a series of well-executed details. Get everything within your control in order, and then wait for your moment to come.
Photo credit 京太郎
Photo credit 京太郎
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