Cambaquiz
Also known as: Cambakis Point, Cambaquiz Point, Cambaquiz Slope
Cabilao's sheltered northeast dive, in front of Cambaquiz village, where sandy channels between the reef patches hold pipefish and stargazers.
Last updated August 2026
The dive
Everything here is in the gaps. Strips of bare sand run between patches of coral and seagrass on the slope in front of the village, and those strips are where the hour goes.
A guide works them slowly. Ghost pipefish lie in the open sand, small and grey and shaped like nothing in particular until you have been shown one. Nudibranchs sit on the patch edges, scorpionfish hold still on the rubble and dare you to find them, and green turtles come over the coral. The light on this slope is good, which matters on ground where the finding is the whole point.
Out past the reef the slope stops. A wall takes over with one cave in it at around thirty metres, and the rock carries on underneath. Where it ends is not written down anywhere.
After sunset the sand becomes a different dive. Stargazers under the surface with just the eyes showing, octopus out hunting, crabs and shrimps that spend daylight underneath something.
What makes it special
Vertical faces, water that turns around the headlands, depths nobody has sounded: that is the west coast, and it is what Cabilao is known for. This shore faces the other way. It sits in the lee, the water over it barely moves, and the dive is spent on flat ground looking for animals four centimetres long.
That inverts the island without leaving it. When weather shuts the west side down, this is where the boats go, and it happens to be the one Cabilao dive with a village and a beach directly behind it, which is what makes a night dive here a short arrangement instead of a project.
What the dive has no version of is scale. No landscape shot, no wall to hang under, and the one large sighting anybody carries away from here is a school of unidentified fish, seen passing below a pair of divers over twenty years back.
Know before you go
Two dives share this ground and only one of them is easy. Stay on the sand and coral and this is a shallow, unhurried hour on the calmest water the island has. Cross the edge and none of that carries over. The face below the reef runs past the depth a recreational card covers, nobody has put a floor on it, and there is no reason out there to be at that depth in the first place. Work out on the boat whether the wall belongs in your dive at all.
If it does, think the cave through. It sits at around thirty metres, its size is disputed, and what reads as a swim-through from outside may turn out not to be. It is also the deepest thing on this dive anyone stops for.
Coming from the resort beaches means going round the island instead of straight out, so the boat leg runs longer than anything else on Cabilao. Entry from the south end of the village beach works too, and that is usually how the night dives happen.
Neither this island nor the province behind it has a chamber worth planning around. Bohol's was described in April 2023 as sitting idle in Panglao, a few weeks after the provincial disaster council voted funds to get it working again, and a vote to fund a repair is not the same thing as a working chamber1. Cabilao is administered from Loon. Its district hospital, over in barangay Canhangdon, is called Congressman Natalio Castillo Sr. Memorial Hospital. Built to stand in for the one the earthquake of 2013 took down, it was still short of finished in March 2023, and no public statement covers what it is equipped for2. Anything worse goes to Tagbilaran City, and Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center takes it from there, which from this shore is a crossing followed by an hour or so on the road. Public boats stop running around six.
Put the DAN Asia-Pacific line, +61 8 8212 9242, on paper somewhere dry, and make sure your cover pays for a chamber outside the province.
Why Dive Cambaquiz
What makes this dive site stand out.
- The island's calm side
It faces east into the lee, and the water over it barely moves
- Sand between the reef
Strips of open sand run between coral and seagrass patches, and hold pipefish
- Stargazers after dark
The same sand turns over at night, with octopus, crabs and shrimps out on it
- A wall past the reef
One cave sits in it at around 30 m and the face runs on below with no published floor
Depth & Profile
Location
9.8855°N, 123.7938°E
Conditions & difficulty
Summary
Easy where the dive happens, which is the reef and the sand. The wall beyond is a separate decision and a much bigger one: it carries a cave at around 30 m and no published floor, and nothing about the shallow ground warns a diver off it.
Safety considerations
What can go wrong here, and what divers do about it. Conditions change - take the briefing from the operator on the day.
- Depth: The wall past the reef drops below recreational limits and no floor has been published for it. That matters more here than it would on a dive people arrive braced for, because everything above it is shallow, still and unhurried, so there is no moment where the site tells a diver that it has changed.Settle on the surface whether the wall is part of this dive at all. Everything the site is dived for, day or night, sits on the reef and the sand above it.
- Overhead: One cave sits in the wall face at around 30 m and its size is disputed, so a diver cannot know in advance whether it is a recess or a passage.Treat it as overhead whatever it turns out to be. Exit in sight, one diver at a time behind the guide, trim held off the roof and the floor.
- Remote location: Cabilao has no recompression capability, and no chamber anywhere in Bohol can be counted on. Getting to definitive care starts with a boat off the island, and public crossings finish in the early evening.Shallow profiles, which this dive makes easy, cover that will pay for treatment off the province, and the emergency numbers on paper before anyone gets wet.
Marine Life
Frequently Asked Questions
How deep is Cambaquiz?▾
No maximum is published here, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Three answers exist for the wall and they do not fit together: 30 m, from a diver who was here before 2003; 35 m, from a shared listing filled in by a handful of contributors; and 'past recreational depths', from the operation that dives it weekly, which is not a figure at all and does not sit comfortably with 30. Twenty metres circulates as well. That one is the average-depth field of the same shared listing that supplies the 35, so it was never a maximum in the first place. What is left is a cave at around 30 m, and the dive almost everybody actually does, which is sand and reef well above it. Set your own floor and let the wall be scenery.
What is the cave at Cambaquiz, and can you go in?▾
It opens in the wall face at around 30 m, and how big it is decides whether you should be inside it. One account calls it small, another calls it larger, and the same stretch of wall is described as carrying more than one cave along with overhangs. Nobody turning up here can know in advance whether this is a recess to look into or a passage to swim. Treat it as an overhead environment either way: keep the exit in sight, follow the guide in one at a time, and hold trim clear of the roof and the floor. It is also the deepest thing on this dive anybody stops for, which is exactly where an easy site stops being easy.
Is Cambaquiz worth doing after dark?▾
Yes, and the sand is the reason. Those open strips between the reef patches read as empty at midday and turn over completely once the light goes: stargazers buried with only the eyes clear, octopus out hunting, and the crabs and shrimps that spend daylight underneath something. The logistics help as much as the ground does, since the dive starts off a village beach on the calm side of the island, so nobody is arranging a long boat ride in the dark. What it will not give you is muck bottom. That is the seagrass ground under the lighthouse headland, which is the island's other after-dark dive and a different kind of floor.
Is Cambaquiz the dive to book when the west coast is rough?▾
That is a large part of the case for it. Cabilao's headline dives all run down the exposed west side, and weather out of that quarter puts the boats in an awkward position. This shore faces the other way, into the lee, and the water over it barely moves. It also earns a slot on a flat day for its own sake, because strips of sand running between coral and seagrass are not what the rest of the island offers. Ask in the morning either way, since the run round to this side takes longer than the couple of minutes it takes to reach the west-coast sites.
Is Cambaquiz one dive site or two?▾
The name covers more ground than a single dive. Cambaquiz is a village and one of Cabilao's five barangays, so it labels a stretch of the northeast shore and not one piece of reef. An outside dive map splits it into two pins roughly a kilometre and a half apart, a slope and a corner. This page is the slope, the gentler of the pair, in front of the village itself. The corner lies up towards the island's northeast tip and gets described as a mix of wall and slope. The spelling Cambakis turns up too, for the same place. If the boat says Cambaquiz, ask which end of it.
Are there hammerheads at Cambaquiz?▾
No, and this side of the island is not where the claim started. The winter hammerhead season that Cabilao still gets sold on was written down by a diver describing the northwest corner, before 2003, when the animals were around. The same diver wrote this dive up as well, and put pipefish in the sand instead of a shark in the blue. The hammerheads were reported fished out at the turn of the century and nothing dated has come out of Cabilao since. One version of the copy still on sale places them at 40 to 45 m, which points a diver down a face nobody has measured, after something nobody has seen here since the 1990s.
References
- 1.Philippine Information Agency, April 10, 2023 — PDRRMC to fund operation of 'unused' hyperbaric chamber
- 2.Bohol Island News, March 19, 2023 — Aris wants Loon hospital done by March this year
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