Ligpo Island

Everything about the approach says muck. Ligpo sits deep inside Balayan Bay, 15 km north of the Maricaban rocks, over ground that ought to be flat sand under green water. What you find under the boat is a shallow reef of rock and boulder packed with coral, and then that ends and a near-vertical face drops away past the limit of sight, with the bottom showing far below in places at over 30 m1.

Fans grow off the face the whole way along, and they are why you carry a torch on a dive that has no need of one for light. Ambient blue strips the colour out of a gorgonian at depth; play a beam across it and yellow through to deep purple comes back. Shapes move at the edge of your vision while you work them. Hold still and they resolve into giant trevally, silver and close to diver-sized.

Off the face, standing alone in open water, is the pinnacle. It is angular, roughly the size of a small office block, and the growth crowding its top is what a resident instructor rates the densest anywhere in this area1. Blacktip reef sharks patrol the crevice between the mound and the wall on days when the reef has been left alone, which is not most days.

A short swim-through marks the end of the face. Then the route climbs back onto the shallow reef, and that is not the consolation half of the dive. The boulder ground up there carries dense hard and soft coral with a pinkish cast over all of it, and turtles feed on the sponges. Approach slowly and let the turtle set the terms and it will often stay with you. Watch the gas while it does, because losing track up here is easy.

Divers come to Anilao to kneel in sand and hunt very small animals. This coast is made of sand and slope, and that is where its reputation comes from. A vertical rock face does not belong to that description, and neither does still water1.

The stillness is the more useful half. Almost every other dive on this coast is graded on flow: where it runs, when it turns, whether the site can be dived at all today. This far into the bay the tide moves very little. A wall you can hang against without working, in an area whose other walls come with a briefing about which way the water is going, is a different proposition.

That combination produces something odd. The shallow reef runs right to the surface with no current on it, so day operations bring people here who have never dived, and the same rock holds a first breath underwater and a face falling past 30 m. Depth is the only thing separating the two, which is not how an easy site and a serious one usually sit together.

For a wall this deep inside a bay the growth is the surprise. Alcyonacean fans line the face, fields of soft coral spread over the slope beside it, and hard corals of several genera hold the shallower rock. Whitetip reef sharks have been photographed asleep on the sand below the face, and unusually large trumpetfish hang around the pinnacle.

Collectors from the California Academy of Sciences have been taking specimens off the north end of this island since February 1992, and because type material has to carry dates, depths and names, the result is a written record almost no dive site has.

Eight specimens came off the north end at 21 m on 25 February 1992, and two more at 26 m in March 19932. All of them became paratypes of Chromodoris dianae, the blue chromodorid described in 1998. Arthur's Rock, over on the Mabini shore, holds that species' holotype.

Then the animal split in two. A 2020 paper separated a cryptic species out of C. dianae, and one of the Ligpo specimens from 1993 was moved into it after twenty-seven years catalogued as something else2. The new species is Chromodoris alcalai, named for Dr Angel Alcala on his ninetieth birthday, in recognition of what he did to preserve Philippine marine biodiversity2. Its holotype is from Kirby's Rock, not from here. What Ligpo holds is paratype material for both animals, a smaller claim than a type locality and a rarer one than it sounds: part of what defines two species came off this rock.

The expeditions kept coming. In May 2010 a team dived the island twice in one day, the first dive to 110 feet, and logged large sea fans, fields of soft coral, anemones with clownfish, squid, jellyfish, giant clams and a cuttlefish across the two3. A year later a curator collecting echinoderms on the same rock caught movement in a crevice that connected with the surface, and spent ten minutes watching a banded sea krait watch him back4.

Thirty metres is the number attached to this dive, and it is a working maximum, not the bottom of the rock. The face keeps falling below it. An expedition dive here reached 33.5 m3. Ligpo also makes going deep easier than it should be. No current means nothing to feel, and the shallow reef above is calm enough that divers arrive at the lip already relaxed. Agree a hard depth before the descent, hold a deep qualification if the plan crosses 30, and watch the computer instead of the fans.

The cavern is not this dive. A cave sits on the east side of the island and is run separately, under names including Ligpo Cavern and Shark Cave. It carries an overhead, its own depth and its own briefing, and it needs cavern training and lights or it needs leaving alone.

Ligpo is in Bauan, not Mabini and not Tingloy. That is worth knowing before you assume anything about the site, because the protected areas and the municipal rules a diver associates with Anilao belong to the peninsula and stop short of this island. What applies at a Bauan site, including whether a fee is charged, is a question for the operator.

Ask what the crossing actually is from your own pier. This island is 15 to 17 km out from the Maricaban cluster, so it is not the quarter-hour hop the rest of the area works on, and published times land anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes4. That makes the morning worth taking. A day at this island has gone from glass flat water to very choppy as the afternoon wind built3.

Getting hurt here is a road problem more than a boat problem. Ligpo lies off the mainland shore of Balayan Bay, so no strait crossing sits between a casualty and a vehicle, and the highway north starts from a point nearer Manila than the peninsula resorts. What is left is long anyway. Nothing anyone can call a working chamber exists on this coast. The one you would actually be driven to is in Metro Manila. Call it 140 km, and between 2.5 and 3 hours at the wheel before traffic or the city leg. Assume it eats the day. Two arrangements and one phone number, all of them made before you board. The insurance has to cover a chamber and the ride to one, not only the treatment. The banca has to carry oxygen, and somebody has to be able to tell you it does. The number is +61 8 8212 9242, which reaches DAN Asia-Pacific.