Arco Point

Fourteen minutes east of Alona the boat cuts its engine over a reef top four metres down, and the dive starts on a sunlit coral garden with the wall on your right shoulder. The drift is already working, running south. For the first stretch the group stays shallow, around eight or nine metres, until the guide turns and swims straight at the rock face, where a dark vertical fissure opens.

The passage necks down as it drops. Its top opening sits at about five metres1, the entrance guides actually use is nearer eight or nine, and it is probably one funnel seen from two ends. Groups go in one at a time from the wall side, feet first or head first. It is short. The walls are alive the whole way, sponge and coral and crinoid at arm's length, so what the swim asks for is buoyancy rather than gas planning. Glassy sweepers and cardinalfish part around you. The exit is a wide arch that puts you onto the face at about sixteen to eighteen metres, and the photograph everybody takes is the one looking back up the shaft at the light2.

From there the dive drifts south along sponge and soft coral, with the guides working the wall for frogfish and eels. The rock bottoms out around twenty metres on sand scattered with isolated patches of black sun coral1, and the sand keeps sloping away past thirty. After roughly half an hour on the steep part the profile lifts to ten metres for a long shallow finish.

Nothing else on Panglao's south coast goes through solid rock. The island's other overhead is up on the north coast, a pair of caves that operators tell divers to stay out of because both are siphons. That leaves this shaft as the only passage on Panglao guests are taken through at all, and the only one a newly certified diver is taken through.

Light does the rest of the work. On a sunny morning it comes down the shaft in beams and the exit reads as a lit doorway; later in the day it is a hole in the rock. The reef either side is a good local wall rather than a great one, and the site earns its place on the boat for the topography rather than the fish.

What divers say about it splits wide. Some call this their favourite of the sites close to Alona; others, with thousands of dives behind them, dismiss the whole south coast as thin. Both are diving the same reef.

Frogfish are the reason to slow the drift down. Painted and warty frogfish sit in the sponges along the wall, and guides find them often enough that two on one dive raises no eyebrows. Ribbon eels come out of the rock into the current and snowflake morays work the same cracks. Divers were calling the macro here excellent well over a decade ago, and guides still dive the wall that way.

Wide angle gets one subject: the shaft. Shoot it from below on the way out, with a diver in the arch for scale. Book the morning boat, because the sun has to be high enough to reach down the hole and the water is clearer before the site has been worked.

The passage is optional, and that is the most useful thing to know before you book. Anyone who does not want the overhead is led around the outside of the arch and rejoins the group on the wall at the exit2. Nobody has to make that decision at the mouth of it.

Buoyancy is the skill the dive actually asks for. Get neutral well before the entrance and hover rather than steadying yourself on the rock. The drift runs south every day of the year and is sometimes strong3, so ask what it is doing at the briefing, carry an SMB, and expect the boat to pick you up downstream. A light is worth having for the pockets in the wall, but no operator requires one for the swim-through itself.

Do not build a dive plan around a chamber on this island. The province was still working to bring the Panglao chambers into service as recently as 20234. The nearest hospital with a named emergency department is Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center in Tagbilaran, roughly nineteen kilometres away across the two bridges, and the coast guard station covering the island is in Barangay Tawala, on 0927-350-5484. Carry insurance with hyperbaric cover.