Diving in Anda

You can, and most people who do it split the week; nobody commutes. Anda is a separate base 100 to 120 km from the airport and two and a half to three and a half hours by car. Panglao gives you the runway, the widest choice of operators and the boat to Balicasag, in exchange for a busier strip. Anda gives you a wall five minutes offshore and macro that visitors rate highly, with few other divers in the water. A resident diver notes that few Panglao visitors ever make it here, usually because they are short on time. With seven diving days, three or four at each end works; with four, pick one.

Both, with the wall the larger share. The coast is a continuous limestone reef with a hard coral shelf that drops into a face bottoming out on sand somewhere between 24 and 36 metres, and most dives are wall dives. The muck sits at the ends of the strip and inside the bays, on pale sand from about eight metres down. What Anda lacks is offshore structure: no pinnacles, no seamounts, nothing further out than the reef in front of you.

No. The shelf at five to ten metres is a real dive, with most reports describing the last fifteen to twenty minutes spent on the coral top, and the muck sites work between eight and about 25 metres. The deeper part of the wall adds sea fans and the cuts in the face, but frogfish and mimic octopus turn up on the shelf and the muck flats, inside Open Water depths.

It depends on depth. The walls start around eight metres, below the worst of the December 2021 storm, and divers through 2024, 2025 and 2026 describe healthy soft corals, sponges and sea fans along them. The shallows are another story. The municipality's monitoring at the Badiang sanctuary recorded coral cover of 49.8 per cent in 2015, 11.7 per cent in 2019, 3.3 per cent in 2022 and 6 per cent in 2024, so recovery between 2022 and 2024 was modest. Badiang is a shallow reef and seagrass site in the northeast, not the wall you will be diving, but it shows how far the shallow coral here sits from where it was.

Most days it is mild and the dive is an easy drift, which is the version operator pages give. The flow is tidal, though: it strengthens between high and low water and runs hardest at the points and over the shelf above the drop-offs. A diver with more than 2,500 dives who visited in June 2025, over the month's largest tide differentials, found it moderate to strong at the end of a rising tide on the first dive of the day. A newly certified diver is fine here with a small group and a guide who tells them what the tide is doing before the first dive, carrying an SMB and reel.

Regular, not dependable. Trip reports run from one or two turtles over a five-day stay in April 2026, to sixteen on a single two-tank morning in 2025, to ten or more per dive in June 2025. Green turtles are the usual animal, with hawksbills beside them on the reef sections. The spread is wide enough that a trip should not be planned around turtles; the frogfish and pygmy seahorses are the dependable part.

Operators list whale sharks as a lucky possibility with no season attached, so plan nothing around one. If a whale shark day trip is offered from here, ask whether the site it visits is operating legally before you pay, because Bohol closed several whale shark watching sites over feeding violations in 2026.

Fly to Bohol-Panglao and drive, or take the fast ferry from Cebu City to Tagbilaran and drive from there; the road leg is two and a half to three and a half hours. A private car from Alona has cost about 95 US dollars, and a resort-arranged car from the Tagbilaran ferry port 3,500 pesos. Public vans are cheaper but sell by the seat, most divers buy a second one for their gear, and they do not run directly into Anda. Once here you need your own transport: self-drive hire runs 1,600 to 2,000 pesos a day and many divers end up on a scooter.

At some operators and not others, so confirm when you book. Some resort dive centres fill nitrox, and 1Peace Divers states that it does not offer it and sets its depth limit at 40 metres for divers with a deep specialty. It is worth having here even though nothing demands it, because the profiles are repetitive 20 to 30 metre wall dives, three or four a day, a long way from a chamber.