Diving in Coron

A Japanese supply fleet ran from the American raids on Manila Bay in September 1944 and anchored at Coron in the belief it lay beyond carrier range. US Navy aircraft found it there on the morning of the 24th1. The strike is remembered as one of the longest-range carrier attacks of the Pacific war, and the ships that went down that morning are the whole reason to dive here. Coron sells steel. Reef diving belongs to the Visayas.

What that steel is called depends on who is talking. Four hulls are settled. The Irako was a naval provision store ship and lies at the mouth of Coron Bay2; the Akitsushima was a seaplane tender and is the only true warship among the dived wrecks; the Kogyo Maru carried construction material for an airstrip; and the freighter now called Olympia Maru went unnamed for years and was known simply as the Tangat wreck3. Names moved between hulls as the identification work progressed, and two of those moves are still visible on shop lists4. The tanker off Concepcion was dived as Taiei Maru for over fifty years and is now called Okikawa Maru, although the naval record leaves a doubt about which tanker went down where5. The Morazan is argued over too, published elsewhere as Ekkai Maru. So is what sank the Kyokuzan Maru off the northeast coast, scuttled by her crew or holed by near misses. Three more hulls have no established identity at all. The Lusong gunboat, the East Tangat gunboat and the Skeleton Wreck are known by where they lie rather than by a name, and the ship names some lists attach to them come from nowhere firmer.

The diving splits by depth and by what an overhead costs you. The Lusong gunboat breaks the surface at low tide and bottoms around 12 metres, with wide swim-throughs and black coral on the frames, and the East Tangat hull lies inclined on the reef from a couple of metres down. The Okikawa Maru is the long shallow one, decks at 10 to 16 metres and encrusted end to end. The Olympia Maru sits upright with open cargo bays at 18 to 24 metres, and divers rate it after dark. Deeper, the Kogyo Maru and the Akitsushima run into the mid thirties, where the seaplane crane still reaches out across the sand with an anti-aircraft gun beside it. The Irako is the one divers name first and the one that takes several dives to learn. Her bottom is at 43 metres and her deck between 28 and 35.

Barracuda Lake is the outlier, and divers who have done it name it as the thing not to skip. You climb over the karst from the boat, then drop through a cool freshwater lid into salt water that warms as you go down instead of cooling, past bare rock walls with almost nothing living on them. Back in the bay the water is the price you pay for the ships. Visibility runs roughly 8 to 20 metres on the big wrecks and follows the tide, clearest before high water. A hull coming out of green water at 15 metres is the normal Coron experience, not a bad day.

December to April is the settled window and July to September the wettest and least reliable, though the diving runs year round. Once you are there the tide matters more than the month. It drives both visibility and current, hardest around the full and new moon, and the order of the sites is the operator's call and not yours.

Getting in is easy by Philippine standards. Busuanga's airport is about an hour from Manila and 30 to 50 minutes by road from Coron Town. Ferries from El Nido exist and get cancelled, so fly or budget a spare day. From town the run to the main body of wrecks is about 90 minutes in a wooden outrigger banca, against 15 to 30 minutes from a resort on the far side of the bay. That is the real accommodation choice, and it trades the widest pick of shops against the longest boat rides.

Certification here is four questions, not one. The shallow hulls between 3 and 22 metres are Open Water dives with open swim-throughs. The recreational-depth wrecks between 12 and 30 metres are Open Water on the outside and Advanced plus a wreck specialty to go in. The deep group between 22 and 40 metres wants Advanced as a floor, and the Akitsushima allows no swim-through without a wreck certification. The Irako's engine room and the cave under Barracuda Lake are technical dives. That ladder is not applied evenly across the town, and divers report shops taking freshly certified customers inside hulls, so ask an operator what they will and will not take you into and be willing to refuse an entry underwater. The failures that get described are specific: a doorway silting out behind a guide, a diver separated from his group inside a ship, about a metre and a half of headroom where bomb damage compressed parts of the Irako's decks. Live ordnance remains on and inside the Akitsushima. Nitrox is worth having for repetitive 25 to 35 metre days, and not every shop stocks it.

Nothing comes off these wrecks. Under Republic Act No. 10066 anything on a site more than fifty years old is state-owned cultural property, and disturbing an underwater archaeological site takes written authority and museum supervision6. Coron Island carries older protection as well, declared a national reserve in 1967 and a tourist zone and marine reserve in 19787. What matters most to a visitor is that the island, its lakes and a large area of the surrounding sea are Calamian Tagbanwa ancestral domain8. Barracuda Lake and the Coron Island shore sites are visited on the community's terms. Fees are collected, as a municipal tourist charge and again at the lakes, and the amounts move around, so ask what your trip already covers.

Settle the evacuation question before you book, because the boat is the wrong place to discover the answer. No working recompression chamber is confirmed in Coron. One is being built: the state tourism infrastructure agency contracted the building in January 2025, then in October 2025 issued the notice to proceed for moving a chamber from Zamboanga to Coron, testing and commissioning included9. Its opening had not been announced as of August 2026, and the same agency's centre at Panglao was still waiting on staff and an opening date10. The chambers reported operational as of February 2025 were the Lung Center in Manila, the agency's building at Mandaue City on Cebu, and Ospital ng Palawan in Puerto Princesa11. Puerto Princesa is the nearest and shares the province, and it is still not the easy answer: no airline flies Busuanga to Puerto Princesa direct, so the scheduled route runs through Manila. In practice the chain is oxygen and the operator's plan on the boat, the road to the airport at Busuanga, and a flight of about an hour to Manila, chartered if it has to be. Carry insurance that pays for hyperbaric treatment and evacuation, and ask your operator where this stands on the day you dive.

Coron Island is Permian limestone, a karst block of cliffs, submerged walls and inland lakes reached by a climb over the rock, with no way in from the sea. Barracuda Lake and Kayangan Lake sit in that karst and not in a volcanic crater. The dive sites themselves are barely geology at all: the bay floor is soft silt and sand between about 12 and 43 metres, and what divers come for is the steel standing on it, upright or listed, with hard coral and black coral grown over the frames.