Badian Island West

Two names, one island. Badian Island and Zaragosa Island are the same low island in Badian Bay, six kilometres down the coast from the Panagsama strip, and the diving is on the reef that fringes it. Coral grows branching and massive over rock, with sand between the heads. Above it a band of stone uncovers when the tide drops1.

The ride out takes ten to twenty minutes by outrigger, on the same circuit that reaches the coastal reefs either side of Moalboal. What happens once you are in the water is the guide's to set. Depth, route and turnaround are all decided in the briefing on this one, so listen to it and get the numbers before you gear up.

Fishing stopped here in 1987 and never restarted. The sanctuary covers about 9.7 hectares of the island's reef, a cooperative of island residents runs it, and the municipality pays an honorarium to a guard who lives in a guardhouse and watches the water1. Four decades of continuous local management is rare on a Philippine reef of this size, and it is the argument for making the trip.

It shows up in a count. When the reef was last surveyed, in 2013, the water inside the line held about 68 species per 500 square metres against 48 in the water immediately outside, and the species people fish for ran denser inside at roughly 137 per 500 square metres against 872.

The other difference is traffic. This reef is not on the daily rotation out of Panagsama and cannot be walked into, so the only boats that reach it are the ones that were asked to.

The instrument is dated and numbered. Badian Municipal Ordinance 01-1987 closed the water, the sanctuary was set up under it by the Central Visayas Regional Project, and two later ordinances in 1989 and 2003 added to the protection1. Saavedra, on the Moalboal coast north of here, was declared in the same year2. In 1998 a presidential proclamation put the whole of the Tañon Strait under protection as a seascape, this water included, though that designation works at the scale of a strait and asks nothing of a diver.

On 6 February 2012 an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 hit the strait, its epicentre between this coast and Guihulngan on Negros. Water pulled off the shore and returned as waves that crushed through the reef walls, breaking coral and the pumpboats hauled up on the beaches2.

The reef has been counted five times, in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2013. The deeper zone inside the sanctuary is the one that moved: live hard coral at 72 per cent in 2007, 44 in 2010, and about 36 in 2013, with bare substrate taking up the difference2. Then the record stops. Typhoon Odette crossed the Visayas in December 2021 and stripped the shallow coral on the Moalboal coast six kilometres north, and nobody has counted this reef since.

The fee you pay here is not Moalboal's. This island is in the municipality of Badian, its sanctuary was declared under Badian's ordinances, and the user fees that keep the reserve running go to the cooperative on the island1. No amount is posted in advance, so ask your shop what the fee is and who receives it. A Moalboal ticket buys Moalboal's water.

Then arrange it early. One shop on the strip takes the trip only with eight divers confirmed a week ahead and a permit arranged for the group, which turns this into a plan rather than a booking. The resort on the island has a dive desk of its own, and that is the other way in.

Help is a long way off, in a direction most people ignore until they need it. The chamber at Mandaue City is 82 kilometres from Panagsama and about two and a half hours by road, and all of that gets worse from Badian, which is further south again. Only three chambers were operational nationally in early 2025. Bring insurance that pays a hyperbaric bill, put the DAN Asia-Pacific line (+61 8 8212 9242) in your phone before the boat leaves, and confirm there is oxygen aboard.