Diving in Donsol

Donsol has no scuba dive sites in its own municipal waters. What it has is a bay thick enough with plankton to hold whale sharks for weeks at a time, and a rule that you meet them on a snorkel. Between 2006 and 2020, 614 individual whale sharks were photo-identified in these coastal waters, about 49 percent of the known Philippine population, with roughly 47 to 61 animals present at any one time through the season1. Outside Oslob it is the largest whale shark aggregation in South-East Asia, and it is the only place in the region where neonates and mating behaviour have been recorded1. Nothing is put in the water to bring them in.

The snorkel rule is national, and it names this place. Joint Memorandum Circular No. 01, series of 2020, issued jointly by the tourism, agriculture, interior and environment departments, prohibits using scuba or any surface supplied air system at whale shark dedicated interaction sites, and Annex I of the same circular opens its list with Donsol, Sorsogon2. People get this wrong in both directions. The prohibition covers only the sites on that list, so it is not true that a whale shark can never be met on scuba in the Philippines. It is also not one town's house preference. Municipal Ordinance No. 12 of 1998 declared Donsol's municipal waters a sanctuary for the butanding and vested the interaction programme in the local government3, thirteen years before the provisioning operation at Oslob began, and whale sharks and manta rays have been protected from catch and trade nationwide since March of that same year4.

The code of conduct the boats run on was adopted from Western Australia's Ningaloo framework and written by the municipal tourism council5. How closely it is followed was measured, not asserted. Across 777 interactions in 2004 and 620 in 2005, the no-scuba rule was observed 99.9 percent and then 100 percent of the time, sixteen years before the national circular codified it. The minimum distance rule was observed 68 percent and then 19 percent of the time, with swimmers averaging 2.03 metres and then 1.64 metres from animals against a three metre requirement5. Both figures describe one programme, and those measurements are now two decades old.

Traffic is what divers remark on. Up to thirty boats are permitted in the bay, and divers have described ten of them trailing a single animal with engines running through the swim. The circular's own design allows one vessel at a time inside a 200 metre interaction zone, with everyone else holding 300 metres out, which works with thirty boats only if they take turns2. The animals carry the record of it. Of the whale sharks identified here between 2007 and 2016, 16 percent had truncated or amputated fins and 19 percent carried propeller scars6. Not feeding an aggregation is not the same as leaving it alone.

The diving is across the water. Donsol's shops sell day boats to Manta Bowl and the San Miguel Island sites, ninety minutes to two hours out across the Ticao Pass, and those sites belong to Ticao Island in Masbate, a different province with its own resident dive operation. Whale sharks do cross them between November and June, which is luck on an ordinary dive and not something anyone sells. Donsol and Ticao sit inside one protected area either way. Republic Act No. 11038 established the Ticao Burias Pass Protected Seascape across Albay, Masbate and Sorsogon in June 2018, and the statute's own table gives its size as 414,244 hectares7; a slightly smaller 413,745 also circulates in official use. In 2024 the same waters were designated an Important Shark and Ray Area, on criteria covering vulnerability, reproductive areas and undefined aggregations1.

Nobody announces the season here. It opens on sightings, which is the opposite of the arrangement at Sogod Bay, where the municipality declares open and close dates each year. The envelope runs November to June and the peak falls between February and May, consistently across every year of the long photo-identification record6. Those are also the calmest months and the clearest water across the pass. Aim at February to May if the animals are the point of the trip, and treat any published month boundary as soft.

Getting here is a flight and a van. Manila to Legazpi takes about fifty minutes, then roughly an hour and a half by road. The interaction leaves the beach in open pumpboats, morning and afternoon, capped at three hours at sea. There is no fixed site and no coordinate to hand you. Spotters range the bay, usually within half a kilometre or so of the shore, and everyone goes in the water when an animal is found. Encounter rates in peak season are high. The morning is still not a guarantee, and it is not sold as one.

Read the in-water rules before you go, because your guide enforces them and because they are national law rather than local custom. Three metres from the body, four from the tail. Ten people per animal, guides and researchers excluded, and one vessel inside the interaction zone. Thirty minutes per interaction. Boats hold five kilometres an hour inside the zone and leave no wake. A life jacket or personal flotation device is mandatory for the whole interaction2. Touching, riding, feeding, flash and video lights, camera poles and selfie sticks, drones, dive scooters, jet skis and anchoring are prohibited, along with approaching an animal from directly in front or behind and sunscreens containing benzophenone-2 or nanoparticles. Every boat carries a Butanding Interaction Officer, who is your guide in the water and the person responsible for all of the above, and a boat is not allowed to leave without one.

Costs are set by the municipality: a boat fee, plus a registration fee per person, paid on the day. Rates move. Confirm them at the tourism office when you register, and do not plan on a figure you found before the trip.

The crossing is the number that decides a diving day. Manta Bowl is an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters by bangka from Donsol, San Miguel Island about an hour, and the town's shops sell the trip as a five to six hour half day for two dives or an eight to nine hour day for three. Manta Bowl is a seamount roughly seven kilometres off Ticao Island, worked at about twenty to twenty-five metres in two to four knots of current, with reef hooks as standard equipment and an Advanced Open Water recommendation from the operators who run it. Expect the possibility of nothing. One diver dived it six times over two days without a manta, while an instructor who guided the area for several seasons describes them turning up constantly through whale shark season. Nobody can tell you in advance which of those you will get.

Two things about the boats, and both are safety matters, not comfort ones. Bangkas are cramped and awkward to kit up in for a diving day, which matters more the longer the ride. And the boat traffic that leaves those propeller scars is the same traffic you are swimming among on the surface at Donsol, which is the practical reason the flotation device is mandatory and the reason to stay with your Butanding Interaction Officer instead of swimming off after an animal.

Donsol Bay opens west into the Ticao Pass, the channel between the Bicol mainland and Ticao Island in Masbate. The whale sharks are here for what is in the water column, not for anything on the seabed. The bay is plankton dense and the animals come in to feed on it. That same productivity is why the water is green and short on visibility, typically two to ten metres through the season, so the thing you came to see and the thing stopping you seeing it from far off are one and the same. Donsol's municipal waters cover about 27,780 hectares. There is no fixed interaction site and no coordinate for one, because the boats range the bay and the swim happens wherever an animal is found, usually within half a kilometre or so of the beach.