Lighthouse

You get in over seagrass, and there is a lot of it. It runs out from the beach in beds with sand between them, and coral boulders sit in the sand furred over with soft coral. The looking is slow. Guides work the open patches for sea moths, for ghost pipefish, for shrimps tucked into anemones, and for the stargazers that lie buried with nothing above the surface but their eyes.

Green turtles are ordinary here. So are banded sea kraits, which come up through the beds and pay nobody any attention.

At about a hundred yards the flat runs out and the corals go over an edge. How far down they carry on is the one thing about this dive that has never been settled, and it may depend on which of the two Lighthouses your guide has brought you to. Ask on the boat.

After dark the same ground becomes a muck dive.

Cabilao sells walls. The diving here happens in the top ten metres of water, over ground you can hang above for an hour without touching anything or running short of gas, and that inverts what the island is known for. Sea moths, stargazers, ghost pipefish and snake eels are what people come to find, and the finding is the dive.

The trade-off is honest. There are no big animals in it, no schooling fish, no landscape shot. What you get instead is an hour of looking at things four centimetres long, with a turtle passing through now and then, on the one piece of Cabilao where nothing is trying to pull you deeper.

Punta Baluarte has been a lookout for centuries. The headland carries the foundations of a Spanish watchtower, a working modern light, and a Spanish-era lighthouse that stood derelict until a conservation grant paid to restore it. The bargain behind the grant was explicit. The island's villages added fifty acres of water to their two no-take zones and committed them for twenty years, and the lighthouse was rebuilt in return. It reopened in May 2011 and holds a small museum. Some of the water in that trade is the water you dive.

The site carries a second history that people are still selling. Divers were coming to this island for scalloped hammerheads all through the 1990s. This corner is where the winter shark claim was first written down, by somebody who dived here and saw them. They were reported fished out around the turn of the century, and nothing dated has been recorded at Cabilao since. The sentence outlived the sharks by twenty years.

Come at night. The seagrass and sand read as empty at midday, and after dark they turn into muck ground: stonefish out in the open, mantis shrimp at their burrows, stargazers buried flat with only the eyes clear of the sand. That last one is the set piece. It is a low-angle shot and a patient one, and locating the animal takes longer than framing it.

By day the work is macro at snorkel depth. Depth is not the constraint here and neither is gas, so an hour can go on one patch of seagrass. Wide angle has nowhere much to point except the edge, and the edge is not why anyone comes.

Ask which Lighthouse you are being taken to. Operators run this stretch as two dives on different ground a few hundred metres apart, and what you get told about the site beforehand may belong to the half you are not diving.

Depth is the thing to settle before you get in. A government report singles out the ledges around this island as water where the current leaves divers uncertain of their own depth and below open-water limits without noticing1. This site publishes no maximum, so bring your own.

A no-take zone lies in this part of the island and one of the two is reported closed to diving outright. No map of the boundaries exists in public, so the guide's line is the only version you have.

Stay off the bottom. Stonefish and scorpionfish sit motionless in exactly the sand a guide is searching, and a fin dropped into the seagrass costs the habitat this dive depends on. An older account from this site describes a guide feeding a fish to a mantis shrimp to draw it out. If that is offered to you, decline it.

Nothing on this island treats a bend. Bohol has a hyperbaric chamber and it does not belong in your plan: it was reported sitting unused over at Panglao in April 2023, and the resolution that was meant to fund the repair had been passed ten days earlier1. The island sits inside the municipality of Loon, whose district hospital carries the name Congressman Natalio Castillo Sr. Memorial Hospital, out at barangay Canhangdon. The building meant to replace the one the 2013 earthquake took was still unfinished when it was last reported on, in March 2023, and what it can handle has never been published2. Anything serious goes to Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center, over in Tagbilaran City, and getting there means a boat off the island plus a stretch of road. Write down DAN Asia-Pacific on +61 8 8212 9242 before the first dive, and confirm your insurance pays for a chamber and for reaching one.