Gorgonia wall

The dive is 5 to 25 m and the wall is deeper than anybody has measured. Those are two different answers and both belong on the same page. The top of the wall sits on a coral shelf at about 5 m, and the two dated dives anyone has published here both logged 23 m and came up with a full dive behind them. The one figure in circulation for the bottom, around 60 m, describes the rock and not the dive: nobody has published a dive to it, and the two places you can read that number turn out to be one line of description repeated, not two measurements. This page publishes 27 m as the maximum because that is the deepest thing a source ties to the dive itself, the very large sea fans that an August 2025 diver saw sitting below him while his computer read 23. A dive computer beats a description every time, and here there are only two profiles on record. Plan against a number you choose, not against a wall that has never been sounded.

Partly, and the honest answer is that it depends what you came for. Nobody on Cabilao publishes a certification minimum for any of its sites, so no one will stop you booking it. The wall starts at about 5 m and the ground between there and 18 m carries fans, sponges, overhangs and everything a guide will find you, so an Open Water diver holding to depth gets a real dive and not a consolation. The reason the page is graded Advanced is what happens below that line: the biggest fans hang lower, there is no floor in view to tell you where you are, and this is the wrong island to improvise a deep profile on. If you hold an Open Water card, dive the top of it, and do that on purpose rather than by accident.

No. Cabilao was dived for scalloped hammerheads through the 1990s, they were reported fished out around 1999 and 2000, and no dated sighting has been recorded at the island since. The historical reports never attached to this wall anyway: the shark ground was the northwest point and the Talisay side. The most useful document is a 2007 species inventory of the island by a diver who was clearly delighted with it, naming three pygmy seahorse species, barracuda schools, ghost pipefish, leaf frogfish and blue ribbon eels, and not one shark. Copy selling a winter shark season is still published in 2026 and one version of it puts the animals at 40 to 45 m. On a wall with no bottom in sight, that is worse than inaccurate.

Not the way it damaged the shallows, on the only look anyone has published since. A diver who pays attention to coral made four dives at three Cabilao sites between 31 July and 3 August 2025 and was blunt about the island: the reef flat that used to be covered in hard coral was rock smothered in algae. He dived two other sites and called them mostly rubble. He dived this wall twice, and it is the one he rated, with soft corals, sponges, very large sea fans and some plating Montipora and Echinopora still on it. That is one observer, one trip and four dives, so it is a pointer rather than a survey. It also happens to be the only dated post-typhoon report in existence for Cabilao. Older accounts of huge table corals here are all from February 2019 or earlier and should be read in the past tense.

Afternoon, and this is one of the few sites where the answer is not just about current. The wall faces west, so late in the day the sun comes across the face instead of from behind it, and both an operator and a visiting photographer have independently said so. If you are shooting wide angle on the fans, that alone is worth arranging your day around. Boat time from the resort beaches is under ten minutes either way, and boats come back between dives, so an afternoon slot costs nothing in logistics.

It is the one every source names first, and the diver who rated it the only good site left on the island in 2025 also thought it was not unique in the region, comparing it to Pescador Island off Moalboal. Both halves are worth carrying. If you have two days on Cabilao, this is the dive to be certain of. If you are choosing between islands purely on wall diving, this is a good version of something the central Visayas has several of. What Cabilao has that the comparison misses is three pygmy seahorse species reported from one small island, and the fans on this face are where the first of them lives.

Some operators run this stretch as a house-reef dive from the beach, because the wall lies directly in front of the resort strip on the west coast and runs parallel to it for a long way. Most diving here is still done from a boat, which takes under ten minutes and puts you on a chosen part of the face instead of whichever part you can swim to. Reaching the island itself is the harder half of the journey: from Panglao it is roughly an hour of road to the pier on Sandingan and then a crossing, or a public outrigger to Talisay that waits until it has sixteen passengers. The last public boats go in the early evening.