East Tangat Gunboat

The bow arrives before the wreck does. It sits about three metres down, tipped up because the hull lies over on her starboard side, and you can see it from the boat. Behind it the sand slope falls away until the stern grounds out at twenty-two metres. Most of the dive happens in between, at around ten.

Swim down one side and what you get is frames and open space. Salvagers took anything worth taking decades ago, so there is no cargo to hunt and no fittings to find. Ribs stand clear, the holds are open to the light, and the gun mount at the bow has sponges growing over it. Coral has taken the upper surfaces. What is left reads as a shape, with nothing in it to itemise.

One passage runs along the outside of the hull and is tight enough to matter. A diver who followed a guide through it in October 2025 came out of it having learned that the cut edges of a stripped wreck find anyone who stops watching their buoyancy. Inside, the openings are short and few. Nobody should book this as a penetration dive.

The second half of most dives happens off the wreck. The sand and reef beside her hold more than the hull does, and guides work them slowly. Mandarinfish are the reason macro photographers come, though they are dusk animals and this is usually an afternoon dive. Lionfish drift over the open frames. Copperband butterflyfish and small schooling fish work the length of her.

Light is a lottery here. On a settled morning the forward half is bright all the way down and the whole hull is legible. Come in the wet season and you may spend the dive on blurred outlines instead.

A snorkeller in the boat can see this one. That single fact separates it from every other wreck in the bay: the bow is in three or four metres of water, so a non-diving partner sees the ship from the surface, and a first-time wreck diver gets a whole hull, top to bottom. Operators recommend it for a first wreck dive ahead of anything else in Palawan.

The salvage is the other half of the character, and it cuts both ways. The big Coron ships still carry their cargo and fittings. This one carries none, because being in a few metres of water made her easy to reach, and what is left is structure, light and eighty years of coral. There is nothing to peer at in the silt and nothing to find, which is exactly why she works as a shape.

Operators are blunt about who will not enjoy that. Divers who came to Coron for depth, current and a big dark hull are told, in writing, to book something else. It is worth taking them at their word.

Three Japanese subchasers were patrolling west of Coron Island on the morning of 24 September 1944 when American carrier fighters came down on them and strafed them. Two of the three sank. The war record covers that morning in detail, down to the pilots' names, and files the group as unidentified submarine chasers and gun boats without naming a single one of them.

This hull is one of the two, and there are two readings of how she came to rest here. In one she was shot up, made Tangat Island under her own power and ran aground in the passage between Tangat and Apo. In the other her crew put her in the shallows deliberately and went ashore. Both start from the same observation, that nothing on her looks like bomb damage, and neither can be pushed further.

What she was is open as well. She has been described as a gunboat, as a submarine chaser and as a converted tug, and her length is given as thirty, thirty-five or forty metres depending on who swam it. A Japanese name is attached to her on dive shop pages in four spellings, and no record carries any of them. One name is already taken: for years the Tangat wreck meant the Olympia Maru, a much larger ship west of the same island, until she was identified1.

The part you actually dive is what happened afterwards. Lying in a few metres of water made her the easiest wreck in Coron to reach, and salvagers stripped her of anything of value long before anybody thought of her as heritage.

The metal here was cut, not worn. Salvagers took this hull apart with tools, and edges made that way keep their bite in a way eighty years of sea does not produce. A full-length suit answers it, chosen for abrasion and not for warmth, since the water runs 27 to 30 degrees. Gloves cover the unintentional brush and tropical operators often do not carry them, so bring your own if you want them. Keep clear of the structure either way.

Your ceiling here is other people. Boats moor over the wreck, the bow is at snorkelling depth, and swimmers are usually in the water between you and the surface. Send an SMB and come up with your eyes on the surface.

If you hold an Open Water card, decide before you get in where the dive stops. The stern at twenty-two metres is past your limit and the slope down to it gives you nothing to notice, because the wreck just carries on.

Take nothing, including the small things. Everything on and in her is state property under Republic Act No. 10066, which covers any site over fifty years old and requires written authority and museum supervision before anyone disturbs an underwater one2. On this wreck the statute reads as a late arrival, since the salvagers got here first, and what they left is all there is.

A final note on the shape of the day. This wreck is where a Coron wreck day ends, after hours spent on the deep hulls, and no working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere in Coron. The nearest one reported working is in Puerto Princesa, in the same province, with no direct flight from Busuanga. Plan the day as a single profile.