Bohol Beach Club

Boats run east out of Alona, about 10 minutes, and what they drop you over is sand with coral pinnacles standing on it. You work southwest with the slope to your right, and a light drift usually does the pushing. Almost the entire dive happens between 7 and 15 m.

The shallow band is small stuff. Sun coral on the pinnacles, a fire dart goby hovering over its hole, a dragon sea moth working the sand, frogfish if the guide is good. Sergeant majors school through it in numbers and are the one fish anybody will promise you in advance.

Somewhere along the slope there is a small cave with cardinalfish packed inside. A diver who has been into it describes a hole in the roof and the light that comes down through it, flatworms and nudibranchs on the rock, and as many as 4 morays and snake eels around the mouth, out of their burrows and swimming in the open because people had been feeding them there.

At the far end the gorgonians start, near 30 m, and that is the ground guides comb for pygmy seahorses. It is the only part of this dive that needs the deep end.

The jeepneys come last, on the way back up. Two of them, one lying on its roof, in water shallow enough that a long safety stop over them costs nothing.

Two Philippine passenger jeepneys lie on this slope, and nothing else on Panglao has anything like them. Soft coral has grown over one. No description of this dive says when they went in, who put them there or why: five separate accounts of the site say only that they were dumped, and the record stops there.

The reef under them has been surveyed six times since 1996, and it is in poor condition. Live hard coral stood at 22 per cent in 2023, down from a peak of 35 per cent in 2003, and almost no branching coral came through Typhoon Odette in 2021, which arrived from the southeast and hit this side of the island square on1. The counterweight sits in the same survey. Target fish inside the sanctuary were counted at nearly four times their 2007 density1. A thinner reef with more fish on it is not what anyone expects, and both halves were measured on the same day.

The sanctuary itself is 3.9 hectares, set up in 1998 and run by the Bolod barangay, and its boundary encloses only the shore side1. So the deeper half of the dive very likely sits outside it, on a line nobody has published. Not one operator description of this site mentions that a sanctuary is there at all.

Ask about the pygmy seahorses before you get in, not at 30 m. Two shops say in their own words that finding one takes a guide who already knows which gorgonian to swim to, and it is the single thing on this dive worth the deep end. One operator publishes the least flattering and most useful line about its own site: nothing below 27 m is interesting. Take that as your depth plan.

The drift is the other thing to settle at the briefing. It is mild and it is there most days, and on the one chart that scores every local dive on the same scale this site rates highest of the group for current. Take a surface marker up with you and count on being collected downstream.

Buoyancy earns its mention here for a reason it does not on every page. The reef is thin, it has been measured that way for nearly 20 years, and the sanctuary over it was described in 2023 as weakly enforced on a beach carrying hundreds of visitors on a summer weekend. Stay off the coral and stay off the vehicles.

Do not build a plan around a chamber. Nothing confirms a working one on this island and the province reported its own out of service in 2023. Head for Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center, Tagbilaran, numbers (038) 411-4868 and 411-4869. Coast guard keeps a station for the island at Barangay Tawala, number 0927-350-5484, and DAN Asia-Pacific answers on +61 8 8212 9242. Hold insurance that covers hyperbaric treatment.