Daryl Laut

An open steel frame, stripped of everything that could be carried off, lying tilted down a reef slope off the west side of Caban Island. What it was before that is not settled. Divers on this coast know it as a floating casino and have been calling it that since at least 2007. Some call it a barge as well, and the two words look like two descriptions of one flat-hulled floating structure and not two different vessels. What nobody has is a record. There is no registry entry, no dated loss report, no survey and no casualty record, and the telling splits on the decade, the late 1970s against the 1980s, and on what happened, a lightning strike against a fire. So this page gives no ship name, no type, no length and no sinking date. None of them can be supported, and an unidentified structure is what the dive actually is.

Both, and you will also meet Darilaut, Daryl-laut and Daryl's Laut. Neither of the two main spellings has won and neither is more correct: operators, dive clubs and divers on this coast use them interchangeably for the same structure off Caban Island. It matters mainly when you search, because half the material sits under one spelling and half under the other. If a shop's schedule says Dari Laut and you were sold Daryl Laut, it is the same dive.

The shallow end, yes. The frame starts at 12 to 13 m at the top of the slope and that part of the site sits inside Open Water limits. The bottom of it does not. The deep end is at 28 m, ten metres past the 18 m an Open Water card authorises, and this is the Anilao site operators use for the Advanced Open Water deep dive. You will see Open Water quoted as the minimum for the site, sometimes on the same page that gives the depth as 28 m, and those two statements do not fit together. Take an Open Water card to the top of the frame and an Advanced card to the bottom of it.

About 12 or 13 m at the up-slope end and 28 m at the down-slope end, and that band is unusually well established for this coast. Three separate accounts spanning nearly twenty years put the deep end at 90 feet, 27 m and 28 m, which is agreement inside a metre across three different ways of measuring. The sand keeps going below the deep end and you will find a much bigger number attached to this site in places. That number describes seabed, not a dive: nothing on the frame goes below 28 m, and there is no reason to follow the slope past it.

Expect ten to fifteen metres and be pleased with twenty. Divers who know the site well describe the water here as murkier than the coast's better days, and the practical advice that goes with it is to dive it while the tide is still flooding. There is a second reason the visibility disappoints people: this is the site local divers fall back on when the weather has closed the exposed ones, so a lot of divers meet it on the worst days of a trip. On a settled morning on a flooding tide it is a different dive.

You do not need to, and that is what makes the site work for the divers it is sold to. The plating is gone, so the frame is an open cage of beams and pylons and a diver swims through the gaps and back out again without ever being under an overhead. Some divers do push into what is left of it. That is a trained wreck diver's decision on a structure that has been cut apart for scrap and has coral growing over its edges, and none of the diving this site is known for requires it.

Metro Manila, which is most of a day away from a dive graded easy. Nothing evidences a working chamber in Anilao itself. Reaching one that does work means three legs: 15 to 30 minutes by banca to shore, another 20 minutes or so on top of that because Caban Island is in Tingloy and the strait has to be crossed first, then about 140 km and two and a half to three hours of road. Nobody publishes a door-to-door figure and no honest one exists. It matters more here than the grading suggests, because the hazard on this site is unplanned depth on a slope that gives you no cue. Carry the DAN Asia-Pacific Diving Emergency Service number: +61 8 8212 9242.