Diving in Anilao

Roughly November to May, with April and May the busiest and the shoulder months the most comfortable. June to October is the low season: the southwest monsoon, the habagat, blows onto the west-facing coast and typhoon risk rises, but diving continues and prices drop. The useful thing to know about the wet months is what happens when it does blow. The coast guard stops the boats going out, and shops switch to shore diving on the other side of the peninsula, which is sheltered and holds some of the best macro sites in the area. A blown-out week here changes which coast you dive; it does not cancel the trip. Visibility is another matter: ten to fifteen metres is normal, and it collapses to a few metres after a storm or heavy run-off off the mountains.

Yes, and the honest answer on the amount is to ask your operator. A conservation fee is charged per diver per day under municipal ordinance and is normally added to your resort bill, so many visitors never handle it directly. It started in Mabini in September 2003 after a survey of what divers were willing to pay, and from September 2005 a unified pass covered sites in both Mabini and Tingloy. Most of the money is earmarked for coastal resource management: the Bantay Dagat sea patrol, mooring buoys, dive passes and coastal clean-ups. The rate has been raised more than once since 2003, the figures in circulation disagree with each other, and no current ordinance rate was available to publish here, so treat any number you read as unconfirmed and check it when you book.

Parts of it are, and every layer of that protection is municipal. The Mabini Marine Reserve has covered 356 hectares since a 1991 ordinance, running the entire coastline of the barangays of Bagalangit and San Teodoro out to 700 metres from shore, and it was the first marine protected area in Batangas province. Three sanctuaries sit inside it, at Cathedral Rock, Arthur's Rock and Twin Rocks, and Batalang Bato, also called Pulang Buli, is the sanctuary on the Tingloy side. All are closed to fishing. Diving is allowed inside them, conditional on the fee. What is not the case is a national designation: the Verde Island Passage, the strait these waters open onto, has been the subject of a long campaign by the environment department and the five surrounding provinces for legislated protection, and that protection has not been enacted.

It is what divers here call it, and unusually for a nickname there is real evidence underneath it. Two nudibranchs carry their type material from dive sites on this coast: Chromodoris alcalai from Kirby's Rock off Caban Island, and Chromodoris dianae, whose holotype was collected at Arthur's Rock in April 1996. Paratype and voucher material in the same work came from Cathedral Rock and from the north end of Ligpo Island. The California Academy of Sciences, whose scientists have worked this region since 1992, puts the general case in its own words: more nudibranchs have been discovered and described here than any marine ecosystem on earth. What you will also see quoted are species totals, six hundred and up. No count of that kind has a method or a counter attached to it, and none is repeated here.

Some do, and you can say no. Divers report guides moving nudibranchs and other small animals into better positions, and encouraging photographers to go negatively buoyant and lie on the sand for the shot. It sits badly against the no-manipulation rule the area's own underwater photography competition works to, and it is worth settling at the briefing, before anyone is in the water. Tell your guide you want the animal left where it is, and dive the way you want to dive. Staying off the bottom is worth doing for its own sake here: blue-ringed octopus, stonefish, scorpionfish and stargazers all live in that sand, and the sand itself is the habitat the photographs are of.

There are two, and travellers have booked the wrong one. The diving Anilao is a barangay of Mabini in Batangas, on the coast; there is also an inland Anilao near Lipa City with no sea attached to it. Route to Mabini, or to Anilao Port, and do not search on the name Anilao alone. Getting there is a road journey of two to three hours from Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, with no domestic flight in the middle, which is a large part of the appeal. By public transport it is a provincial bus to the Batangas City terminal, a jeepney signed for Mabini or Anilao Port, then a tricycle. Once there, several resorts are reached only by boat from the port or by a long descent of steps from the hillside road, which is worth knowing before you arrive in the rain with unpacked gear.

It depends on what you want to look at. This is a coast of small animals found slowly, and the dive day is built around a camera: guides work as spotters and will have the next three subjects lined up before you finish with the first. If you enjoy that kind of diving you do not need a camera to enjoy it. If you came for schooling fish in blue water, big animals or reef scenery, the honest position is that this is not the destination for it. Reef sharks are occasional and deep at the current sites, whale sharks are very rare, and neither belongs in a booking decision. Twin Rocks and Beatrice Rock give you the wide-angle diving that exists here, and the night dives are good on their own terms.

You can, and it is one of the things this coast is known for. A blackwater dive is a night dive in open water over deep bottom, on a lit downline hung from the boat, watching for the larval and juvenile animals that migrate up from depth after dark: paper nautilus, juvenile octopus, larval fish and jellies that hold their shape for a few seconds in front of a lens. Treat it as a specialist dive: it needs a shop that runs it properly with a tended line, and buoyancy control in water with no reference is the skill it actually tests. Ask which resorts run it before you book, because not all of them do.

The exposed ones, and what gates them is current. Mainit Point, Beatrice Rock, Bahura and Mapating run genuinely strong currents and are dived on a window a guide picks; they are also the sites where a photographer working super-macro will get nothing, because the current makes the framing impossible. The sand flats, the house reefs and the sanctuary reefs are the other extreme: shallow, still and slow. A working assumption is that Anilao is an easy destination with four or five hard dives in it, and that the hard dives are wide-angle dives. Ask a shop to match the site to the day and to what is in your hands.

Since the middle and late 1970s, when Manila-based divers found the underwater attractions of Balayan Bay and started driving out over rough roads to camp by the water. That history has a conservation tail to it that still shapes the diving. Destructive fishing grew in the same decade, the divers were the first advocates for protecting these reefs, and the work led through the Haribon Foundation's coastal management projects from 1988 to the Mabini Marine Reserve in 1991, the first marine protected area in Batangas. The fee you pay is the descendant of that: introduced in 2003, unified across two municipalities in 2005, and folded into the Mabini Integrated Coastal Management Code of 2023.