Habagat Wreck

No, and this is the single most confused thing about diving Panglao. Two small boats lie in similar depths on the same stretch of south coast. The Habagat is off Danao Beach, roughly 2 km west-southwest of Alona, and the shop that still dives it says it put the boat there in 2000. The other lies a few hundred metres off the western end of Alona Beach, went down in 2011, and is properly called the Bohol Divers Wreck, though shops sell it under the Habagat name often enough that one operator publicly complains about it. If a boat is leaving Alona and turning west for nine minutes, you are going to the Habagat. If it stops within sight of the beach you booked from, you are not.

The hull sits at about 35 metres. Published figures for it run from 32 to 37 and cluster on 34 or 35, and the site as a whole is sold as an 8 to 35 metre dive, because the slope you come back up starts at 8. You will also find 20 metres in circulation, attached to an argument that the wreck is comfortable for Open Water divers. That figure is wrong by about fifteen metres and the conclusion built on it is worse than the number. Plan against 35.

You can dive the site, not the wreck, and that is a better deal than it sounds. Every operator that publishes a profile locates the best of this dive on the coral slope between 8 and 20 metres, where the reef fish shoal thickest around twelve and the harlequin ghost pipefish live in the feather stars at the end. That whole band is inside Open Water limits. The hull at 35 metres is past Advanced Open Water's limit too, so it wants Advanced Open Water plus deep training, and the shops that sell it say so.

Divers do, and photographs get taken in what people describe as a wheelhouse. It is still a small corroding hull sitting at 35 metres with no light inside, which makes it a genuine overhead environment on a profile that already has a short clock. Nothing about the interior is documented well enough to plan a route from a page, so the honest position is that penetration here belongs to divers with wreck training, and everyone else has a very good dive outside it.

It is the obvious candidate, since the whole constraint on this dive is no-decompression time at 35 metres followed by a long ascent. What is missing is anyone here selling the dive that way: the operators publish the depth warning and the deco-gas note without mentioning nitrox at all. Availability across Panglao's shops varies, so ask when you book. Do not assume a fill is waiting.

Habagat is the Filipino name for the southwest monsoon, roughly June to October, and that is exactly the wind that exposes Panglao's south coast and sends the boats around to the west. So the site is named after the season it dives worst in. Nobody has published why the name was chosen, and one story in circulation, that a boat sank here in monsoon rain, sits awkwardly against a dive centre's own account of deliberately putting it on the bottom in 2000.

Nobody has established it. Descriptions in circulation call it a cabin cruiser, a banca, a dive boat and a yacht, and those cannot all be true: a banca is an outrigger and has no wheelhouse on a second level. There is no vessel name, no owner, no registry entry and no press report, and a small private boat put down in 2000 is exactly the class of hull that leaves no public record. What is solid is the year, the position, and that a named dive centre says it did the sinking. What lies on the sand is a small boat, and beyond that the page will not guess.