Doña Marilyn Wreck

She lies on her starboard side on sand, a ferry close to 100 metres long with her flank turned up to the surface. Coral has grown over her upper structure from about 18 metres, and one description puts her masts at about 21 metres, lying parallel to a seabed some 12 metres below.

The profile gets agreed before anyone rolls in. Along the upper structure the dive stays between about 18 and 21 metres, and there is time to work the length of her. Down the hull to the sand, at 30 to 35 metres, time is short. Whitetip reef sharks are reported resting on the sand under the bow, with blue-spotted ribbontail rays beside them.

Old fishing nets hang across the wreck, lost long ago and now encrusted in the same coral that covers her. A giant moray is reported living in the structure, scorpionfish and nudibranchs fill in the small life, and now and then eagle rays or devil rays pass in the blue off the hull.

Going inside is a separate dive with its own training. A ship on her side has an interior turned ninety degrees, so floors become walls and doorways open overhead.

The hull is the reef. The seabed around her is mostly sand, which the regional office of the environment department, DENR-7, says could prevent coral from taking hold, and the ship gave it somewhere to grow. DENR-7 rates her a successful artificial coral area and names black corals, an endangered group, among what lives on her1. One operator's description credits the current for how well the coral does here.

That reef is also why her story continued after 1988. Salvage crews have come for her twice, and when they did, the case for leaving her on the seabed was made on the marine life she now carries1.

She was completed in Japan in July 1966 as the Otohime Maru. Sulpicio Lines bought her in 1976 and renamed her Doña Ana, and after a fire on board in October 1978 she was refitted and went back into service as the Doña Marilyn.

She sank in October 1988 in Typhoon Unsang, known internationally as Ruby, on a voyage from Manila to Tacloban1, with the loss of several hundred lives. A fisherman diving near Manoc-manoc Island first sighted the wreck on 10 November that year.

In 2004 a metal company tried to remove the wreckage and was stopped when the Philippine Tourism Authority ordered it not to proceed1. In August 2018 divers going out to the site saw a ship removing pieces of her. The mayor of Daanbantayan condemned the work as done without the town's knowledge, DENR-7 opened an investigation, and the Coast Guard's Cebu station checked whether the salvage ship held a permit1. The mayor's position since is that salvaging a sunken ship in the municipality's waters needs his permit, and that the town will never issue one1.

The crossing is part of the dive plan. It is 90 minutes each way, there is no chamber in service on Malapascua, and treatment means a transfer to the chamber at Mandaue on Cebu, so any problem on this wreck starts with the ride back to the beach.

Current can run strong at this mid-channel site, and it can arrive on the deep option as easily as the shallow one. Keep the sand for a quiet day.

Part of the wreck was taken in 2018, so the structure may not match what older descriptions promise. Hover off it rather than settling on it.

Carry a cutting tool. The nets are grown into the coral across the wreck, at the same depths you are swimming.