Diving in Anda

You can, and most people who do it split the week; nobody commutes. Anda is about 100 to 120 kilometres from the airport and close to three hours by car, so it is a separate base and not a day trip. Panglao gives you the runway, the widest choice of operators and the boat to Balicasag, at the price of a busy strip and a crowded south-coast reef. Anda gives you a wall five minutes offshore, macro that is genuinely better, and almost nobody else in the water. The honest version from a resident diver is that few Panglao visitors ever get here, usually because they are short on time. If you have seven diving days, three or four at each end works; if you have four, pick one.

Both, and the wall is the bigger part of it. The coast is a continuous limestone reef with a hard coral shelf at five to ten metres 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 white, light-coloured sand from about eight metres down. What Anda does not have is offshore structure: no pinnacles, no seamounts, nothing further out than the reef in front of you. It is a coastal reef and wall system with muck attached.

It depends entirely on depth, and the two halves of the answer look contradictory until you separate them. The walls are in good shape. Because the face generally starts around eight metres, it sat below the worst of the December 2021 storm, and divers through 2024, 2025 and 2026 describe healthy coral, soft corals, sponges and sea fans along it. The shallow flats are a different story. The municipality's own underwater monitoring at the Badiang sanctuary recorded coral cover at 49.8 per cent in 2015, 11.7 per cent by 2019, 3.3 per cent in 2022 after the typhoon and 6 per cent in 2024. Outside the sanctuary it fell to 0.3 per cent in 2022 before reaching 6 per cent by 2024. Note that the surveyed reef is a shallow reef-and-seagrass site in the northeast, not the wall you will be diving, but it does say the shallow coral here is a long way from where it was.

Most days it is mild and the dive is an easy drift, and that is the version every operator page gives you. It is not the whole picture. The flow here is tidal: it strengthens between high and low water, runs hardest over the shallow shelf above the drop-offs and around the points, and a diver with thousands of dives who was on this coast over the biggest tide differentials of the month found it moderate to strong at the end of a rising tide on the first dive of the day. Shark Point in particular can be a handful. None of that makes Anda a hard destination. It means a newly certified diver should ask what the tide is doing before the first dive of the day, dive with an operator that keeps its groups small, and carry an SMB and reel.

There is no season, and nothing here should be planned around one. Operators list whale sharks as a lucky possibility, but no dated first-hand sighting turns up in any recent trip report or review, and the December to April window that circulates online has nothing behind it. Bohol is also in the middle of tightening its wildlife rules: provincial regulations that took effect in 2026 prohibit feeding, touching and harassing marine wildlife and require permits under a no permit, no operation policy, and three whale-shark watching sites elsewhere on Bohol were closed over feeding violations, with reopening tied to operators stopping the practice. If a whale shark day trip is offered to you from here, ask whether the site it visits is currently permitted to operate before you pay for it.

Common, and not a guarantee. Dated diver accounts range from one or two turtles across a five-day stay to sixteen on a single two-tank morning, with ten or more per dive reported on another trip. Green turtles are the usual animal and hawksbills turn up alongside them on the reef sections. One resort house reef is described as holding more than thirty individuals. The variation is wide enough that turtles are the wrong reason to choose Anda over its neighbours; the frogfish and the pygmy seahorses are the reliable part.

A per-diver environmental fee is collected, and no published schedule sets its amount. One operator quotes 200 pesos per diver per diving day and 100 pesos for snorkelling as an addition to its rates; no ordinance text and no second operator figure confirms that as a standard, so treat it as one shop's number and ask your own what its price already includes. There is also a separate municipal entry fee of 30 pesos per person, charged on everyone entering the town under an ordinance enacted in 2019 and re-implemented in March 2023, and collected at the boundary with Guindulman. That one was contested straight away: resort owners asked for it to be scrapped for want of a public hearing and provincial concurrence, and the governor asked the mayor to stop collecting it on the highway. What happened after April 2023 is not on record.

Neither is close, and that is the single most important planning fact on this coast. Anda has no hospital at all; the municipality runs one health centre and six barangay health stations. The provincial referral hospital, Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center, is in Tagbilaran, roughly 100 kilometres away and two and a half to three hours by road, the same transfer as the airport. No working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere on Bohol. As of February 2025 the country had three operational chambers, at the Lung Center in Manila, at Mandaue City on Cebu and at Puerto Princesa in Palawan, which puts the nearest documented one across the Cebu Strait. For sea rescue the responsible unit is the coast guard station for eastern Bohol at Barangay Cogtong in Candijay, on 0985-510-8340, with sub-stations at Guindulman on 0916-682-4634 and Candijay on 0985-903-0935. Carry insurance with evacuation and hyperbaric cover, and dive conservatively.

Fly to Bohol-Panglao International and drive, or take the fast ferry from Cebu City to Tagbilaran and drive from there. Either way the road leg is two and a half to three and a half hours. Divers have paid about 95 US dollars for a private car from Alona, 3,500 pesos for a resort-arranged car from the Tagbilaran ferry port, and 3,000 pesos plus a further 800 for a car to Jagna with a tricycle onward. Public vans are the cheap option and often a false economy: they sell by the seat with little baggage space, so most divers buy two seats, and they do not run directly into Anda. Once you are here you need your own transport. Self-drive hire is 1,600 to 2,000 pesos a day and a scooter is what most divers end up on, because the resorts are spread over about ten kilometres of cliff road with nothing walkable between them.

At some operators and not others, so confirm it when you book and not on arrival. One resort centre fills nitrox and another has an on-site compressor and offers it; a third states plainly that it does not offer nitrox tanks and fills air on site. One 2025 visitor also found his assigned guide was not nitrox certified and chose to dive air. It is worth having here even though nothing demands it: the profiles are repetitive 20 to 30 metre wall dives, three or four a day, on a coast whose nearest confirmed chamber is across a strait.