Kalipayan

The wall tops out at three metres and the part worth your air ends around twelve. Groups run it two ways. One drops on the face with the slope on the right shoulder and works southwest, finishing over the sand. The other starts shallow, crosses the reef at seven metres, follows the sandy slope down from twelve, then climbs back to the coral on the wall top for the last third. Both finish in the same place, and that is where the time is meant to go.

Halfway up the face there are caves and crevices, and they are the reason to slow down. A diver in 2023 spent most of his dive with his head inside one of them, and came out with Okenia nakamotoensis and Okenia kondoi. Comets and banded pipefish have been picked out of the same holes, though only in one account.

Beside and below the wall is sand with seagrass over it, and that is different ground holding different animals. Pegasus sea moths sit in the grass. Seahorses too, and robust ghost pipefish in the bare patches between. Divers report bottom times of forty minutes to just over an hour, which is what a shallow site with nothing to chase produces.

Alona's local reefs get a mixed verdict from the people who dive them most, and this is one of the two that survives it. A visiting diver who judged the whole strip poor for critters in 2023 named this wall as an exception, for the Okenia in its caves, and said he had not seen so many since before the pandemic. Species-level nudibranch records are rare on any Panglao site page, and they came from someone with no reason to be generous.

The seagrass is the other half, and it is what separates Kalipayan from the walls west of it. Pegasus sea moths and seahorses are both regular finds in the grass. Neither is a wall animal. A site that is only wall does not produce them.

None of this makes it a headline dive, and nobody local pretends otherwise. Divers who live on Bohol send new arrivals to Napaling and Doljo Point first. Kalipayan is the second dive of the day, the check-out dive, and the one you come back and do again after dark.

In May and June the titan triggerfish here are nesting, and a nesting one will come at a diver who drifts over its patch. Its territory is a cone that widens upward from the nest, so the instinct to climb away is exactly the wrong one. Go low and swim away flat, fins toward the fish. The teeth crack coral and shells. Across Bohol the same behaviour runs from May into July.

The second thing to fix is a hard maximum. That sandy slope keeps dropping past the part of the site anyone dives, to thirty metres and further, and nothing has been described down there worth the depth. Open Water covers the seven to eighteen metre band where all of the interest sits, and that is how the dive is normally run.

The nudibranch caves stay dark at midday, so your light is working long before the sun goes down. After dark it does the whole job. A guide who knows this stretch of wall is worth more than any amount of extra depth: the harlequin ghost pipefish and the Okenia both tend to be found by someone who already knows the spot they sit in.