Diving in Pamilacan Island

Pamilacan sits about 18.6 kilometres east-southeast of the Alona strip and 12.5 kilometres south of Bohol island, which works out at forty to sixty minutes of bangka in each direction and an all-day commitment either side of it. It is a fishing village of about 1,400 people at the 2015 census, with no fresh water of its own, and it is a barangay of Baclayon rather than of Panglao. Every boat that brings divers still leaves from a Panglao beach, which is how the confusion started.

Three dives work the island and they are deliberately unalike. Spanish Tower drops in front of a ruined watchtower at the north end, a coral garden over a slope of large boulders with small caves and grottoes below ten metres and green turtles on the ledges. It is graded for Open Water divers and its shallow end suits a snorkelling companion. Dakit-Dakit is the opposite. It sits on the exposed corner off the east side, entered next to a small outcrop with a single tree growing on it, where sand drops at about 45 degrees and a wall opens around 25 metres. That one is run as a drift, graded advanced, and it holds the schooling jacks and the barracuda. Sanctuary is the slow one. A shallow shelf gives way to broken rock worked for nudibranchs, pipefish and garden eels, and the dive leaves the reef for open water before the buoys arrive.

Current is what separates the island from the reefs on Panglao's own coast, where the water is usually slack. Out here it covers everything from dead still to too fast to stop in, it strengthens through the afternoon, and it is the reason experienced divers make the crossing. Visibility sits between 10 and 30 metres. Green turtles turn up at all three dives, and the reward for the distance is a reef with very few other boats on it.

Pamilacan is a hunting word. The municipality that owns the island publishes two readings of it, one romantic and one plain: a resting place of the mantas, or a derivation from pamilac, the harpoon used to take whale sharks, manta rays and dolphins1. The second has the evidence behind it. In Lila and Pamilacan the tool was a large iron hook about 47 centimetres long, called a pilak, documented as the implement of this island's whale and manta ray hunters2. That is where the name comes from, and it describes what people did here, not what a diver meets in the water.

By oral account the hunt for manta rays in the Bohol Sea goes back to the late 19th century, earlier than the whaling, and fishers from this island did both2. National law closed it in three steps. Dolphins first, banned in December 19923. Whales and porpoises added in July 19974. Whale sharks and manta rays in March 1998, effective that April5.

What replaced it was built deliberately. A dolphin and whale watching programme ran on the island from May 1997 to June 2000, backed by a national marine mammal taskforce and led in the field by a conservation organisation6. It was not welcomed at first. Most of the island was angry that whale sharks and manta rays had been banned in March 1998 with no consultation, and the organiser was advised to leave for a while for his own safety6. By 2024 former hunters were working as guides and boat operators, women had trained as massage therapists, and homestays were taking visitors.

The clean version of that story ends there, and it is only half the record. The programme's own account describes the end of hunting for marine mammals6, which is the precise word, and rays are not mammals. After the 1998 ban Pamilacan was one of six sites in the country with an active mobulid ray fishery; the boats working it numbered 18 in 1993, 40 in 1997 and 14 in 2011; and manta rays, protected since 1998, continued to be caught2. An account from the island in 2013 describes rays coming up dead in nets, and a price that had climbed from a few hundred pesos in the 1960s to fifty thousand once the animal was forbidden. The same account corrects a belief that has stuck to the island for decades: dolphins were not what they hunted7.

What the island holds now is a protected reef and the people who police it. The whole coral reef area around Pamilacan is a Marine Reserve and diving is allowed across it. Inside that, buoys mark out a Fish Sanctuary of 11.90 hectares where nothing may be taken and nobody may dive. The Municipality of Baclayon governs it under Municipal Ordinance No. 1, Series 1994, on a sanctuary established in 1986, and enforcement on the water is done by the Pamilacan Fishermen's Association, an island people's organisation. The people who hunted here now guard it. Beyond the reef, the island sits inside the Bohol Marine Triangle, a management area of 112,000 hectares shared with Panglao and Balicasag8.

Nothing here is rationed. Pamilacan has no diver quota, no advance booking system and no certification filing, which is the practical difference from Balicasag on the other side of Panglao. What limits the day is the boat and the sea. Departures are weekly and not daily at some centres, at least one will not sail below four divers, and a marginal forecast cancels the outing outright, because eighteen kilometres offshore there is nowhere sheltered to move to.

A trip is normally two dives at the island, sometimes three, with the last one occasionally run back on the Panglao side on the way home. Open Water is the certification gate operators enforce and Advanced is what they recommend for the whole outing. The exposed corner starts around 25 metres and is not an Open Water dive. Take nitrox if the centre offers it, because the day is long and not because the diving is deep. Expect a marine fee beyond the dive price, billed against the dive sites by some centres and per diver per day by others, so settle what your price already includes before you sail, and bring pesos in cash.

One rule changes what you do underwater. The no-take core is shut to divers, and nothing marks it except the buoys on the surface, so where its edge falls on a given day is knowledge only your guide carries. Keep outside the markers, treat them as water to stay away from, and remove nothing.

Settle the emergency chain before you sail, because distance is this island's real hazard. The island carries a coast guard substation, tourist police and barangay watchmen, so first response is nearer than the distance suggests. Definitive care is not. Bohol has no confirmed working recompression chamber. As of February 2025 the country ran three, at the Lung Center in Manila, in Mandaue City on Cebu and at Puerto Princesa in Palawan, which leaves the closest about 87 kilometres away on Cebu, over the water. Carry insurance with hyperbaric cover, and take two numbers with you. Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center in Tagbilaran is on (038) 411-4868 and 411-4869. The coast guard station at Barangay Tawala on Panglao is on 0927-350-5484.

An island of coral rock and fossilised shell in the Bohol Sea, 1.75 square kilometres in area, 1.6 kilometres long and 1.25 wide, with a coastline of 4.5 kilometres. The sheltered flank carries a shallow coral garden over a slope of large boulders that tips steeper and holds small caves and grottoes in its face. The exposed east and southeast corner is sand at about 45 degrees, scattered with coral heads, and a wall opens below 25 metres and runs past recreational depth.