Copton Point

A mooring rope runs down to about eighteen metres and ends on sand. After a week of walls, that flat pale bottom is the first thing anyone notices, and it is the whole reason this dive carries a separate name on the boat schedule.

The slope falls away gently from the mooring with staghorn coral on it, and roughly seven metres further down, at the lip of a drop-off, is the spot where the aircraft was placed. What is there now is the open question of this dive. Divers who have been in the water since the typhoon report the aircraft went over that edge: one resident with several hundred dives on this coast said so in 2023, and a logged dive in July 2025 found a single wing inside recreational depth and nothing of the rest visible. The descriptions dive centres still publish put it intact on the sand, cockpit open, both wings detached but lying in flying position. Brief the dive for one wing and treat anything more as a bonus.

Either way, the sand is what to spend the air on. Garden eels stand off the bottom near where the tail lay, shy enough that most groups swim straight over them, and seamoths work the sediment beside them, small armoured fish that walk rather than swim. Neither occurs anywhere else along this coast. This is the one dive in Moalboal where the guide's torch points down instead of sideways.

From the shelf the swim runs north-east or south along the slope. Big sea fans grow on it, and the gorgonians along the wall's edge are in better condition than anything shallower here, which is also the point where the dive stops being benign. Up on the reef top, a diver in July 2025 found the hard coral stripped.

Then the water itself. Five metres is the published floor here, the lowest anywhere on this coast, and on a bad day the shelf, the slope and the drop-off all look the same.

Sand sounds like a thin claim until you have dived the rest of this coast. Every other named dive in Moalboal is a fringing reef with a wall starting a few metres down, so a shop that wants to give a customer something other than a wall has exactly one place to take them. Soft bottom holds different animals, and the two that matter here, the garden eel colony and the seamoths, live nowhere else in the municipality.

The aircraft is why people book it. It was never a coral reef and was never going to be one, because fibreglass grows almost nothing. What it was instead is a small, complete, human object lying flat on an empty bottom at a depth an Advanced diver can reach, which is a different kind of dive from a wall and the reason it drew video crews for a decade.

What is not a reason to come: the coral, which the only dated look at it since the typhoon describes as stripped, and the sardines, which are six kilometres south off a different beach entirely.

The aircraft came off a factory floor in Mactan. LancAir, an American manufacturer with a plant there, donated a two-seater to be sunk as an artificial reef, and Savedra Dive Center took on the job of getting it into the water with the help of the course director Mario Tapales. The wings had to come off to fit it on a truck, and even then the load stopped traffic in Cebu City. A kilometre out of the factory the truck met its first bridge and stuck under it, and a handsaw had to be found to cut a piece off the back wing.

Divers had already picked the spot: a sandy patch on the reef floor at twenty metres, right in front of a drop-off. The problem was weight, because the airframe was empty and had no engines in it. The wings were partly filled with cement and towed out one at a time behind the dive boat, and the hull was packed with old scuba tanks to give fish somewhere to hide. The pieces were put together on the seabed with lifting bags, and a buoy went in afterwards so that visiting boats would moor rather than drop an anchor on the new reef. That buoy is still how the dive starts.

This was not a private dumping. SeaQuest Dive Center, the Coral Reef Club Resort, the Philippine Coast Guard and the Philippine Commission on Sport Scuba Diving all joined the project. The year is soft: 1993 in one telling, and elsewhere only that it happened in the nineties.

What made the site locally famous came later, and it came from the divemasters who worked it. They kept surfacing to report a turtle sitting inside the cockpit, in the pilot's seat.

Advanced Open Water is the level published for this dive, and the reasons stack rather than shout. The deepest feature sits at twenty-two metres, the visibility floor is five, and current runs to three knots where the coastal walls run nought to two. None of it is hard on its own.

The edge is the thing to plan around. The drop-off starts immediately past the aircraft's shelf, in the late twenties of metres, and falls to somewhere between fifty and eighty. A diver who books an airplane wreck, arrives at twenty-two metres and finds nothing must not follow the slope down after it. That water is outside recreational limits, and one wing at recreational depth is the honest expectation.

The environmental user's fee ticket has to be in hand before you get on the boat1. A hundred pesos, and the receipt itself is what permits the dive, so no shop will run you out without one.

Turtles are the animal this site has always been known for, and taking, catching, selling, possessing or transporting turtles or reef sharks has been banned across Moalboal's waters since 2002, with fines that escalate on repeat2. Touching any marine life is prohibited separately, which on a sand dive also means keeping off the bottom you came to look at.

The chamber question is the same everywhere in Moalboal and slightly sharper here. Treatment means Mandaue City: eighty-two kilometres, roughly two and a half hours on a road governed by Cebu City traffic, and eleven minutes of banca before the road even starts. Three chambers were working in the country at the start of 2025. This is the one dive on the coast with a hard edge right beside the spot where divers go looking for something, in the worst water on the coast, so plan it conservatively and carry insurance that pays for hyperbaric treatment.