Lusong Gunboat

Ten metres of bright water over a small hull lying angled on a reef slope, with one end of it near enough the surface to see from the boat at low tide. What is down there is structure. Eighty years of wave action in shallow water have taken the plating and left the frames, so the wreck reads as a skeleton with a reef growing through it1.

That is what makes the swim-throughs what they are. You weave between beams in wide open spaces and you can see the far end before you commit to anything, which is a different activity from the big hulls out in the bay. Divers who have done both say so plainly, and it is the reason this site gets recommended to people who should not be inside the Irako.

The life on it is out of proportion to the size. Bushes of black coral have grown over the frames, lionfish work through them at about the height of your hands, and anemones sit on the steel with anemonefish and porcelain crabs in them. Broadclub cuttlefish turn up just off the wreck and will hold still for a camera. Photographers dive this one twice, wide angle for the hull and then macro for the nudibranchs.

The reef around it earns a mention of its own, a horseshoe that operators rate among the nicest in the area. This is the only Coron site where the reef and the wreck make a single dive.

Nobody knows what this ship was. Every other wreck at Coron has a name, a tonnage and a service record; this one has a single line in a records-based account of the raid, describing a gunboat strafed near Concepcion village, disabled by machine-gun fire, beached at the southern tip of Lusong Island. No name. The compilation that lists full particulars for the six named ships has an entry for this class that says only that details are not yet available.

That absence has been filled in by the dive trade with a Japanese ship name that appears in three different spellings and rests on nothing. It is worth knowing simply so you can recognise it. What she actually is, on the evidence, is an unidentified gunboat or subchaser.

The second thing is the reason she is shallow. The other ships were bombed at anchor and sank where they lay. She was shot up while under way and put on a reef, and a dive that any Open Water diver can do exists because of a decision made under fire on the morning of 24 September 1944.

She went down in the same attack as the rest of the fleet. Aircraft launched from a US carrier group at ten to six that morning, ninety-six fighters and twenty-four dive-bombers, against an anchorage three hundred and forty miles away, and the attack began just before nine2. The big ships in Coron Bay were bombed where they sat.

This one was not. The records-based account has her under way close to Concepcion village when she was strafed, disabled by hundreds of machine-gun rounds, and beached at the southern tip of Lusong Island. That is the entire recorded history of the vessel: no name, no tonnage, no yard, no launch date. The researcher who wrote it noted that details were not yet available and that he would keep investigating, and twenty years later they still are not.

She has been a reef ever since. She is not among the six Coron wrecks whose photogrammetric models were handed to the National Museum of the Philippines in February 2026, all of which are named ships, so no documentation programme is filling the gap either.

Wear a full thin suit. A shorty is not enough cover here. The wreck is a collapsed structure with rusted edges and you are close to all of it in ten metres of water, there are stinging hydroids in the growth, and the sun on a shallow site does the rest.

Keep your hands out of the frames. Lionfish are through this wreck in numbers at exactly the height a diver reaches, scorpionfish sit still on the structure, and stonefish are reported on the reef around it. Hover, do not settle, and hold position clear of the steel. That single habit covers the venomous fish, the rusted metal and the silt at once.

Look up on the way to the surface, all the way. One end of this wreck reaches the surface at low tide, which is why snorkellers and island-hopping boats are here, and they are directly over the dive.

Take nothing. The wreck is over fifty years old, so everything on and in it is state-owned cultural property under Republic Act No. 10066 and disturbing the site takes written authority and museum supervision3. Not knowing which ship she was makes no difference to that, and this is the wreck where the rule is least likely to be said out loud, because half the people above it are snorkellers who never got a briefing.

One last thing, and it is about the day and not the dive. This is normally the shallow dive that closes a day spent on the deep wrecks, and no working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere in Coron. Judge the profile across the whole day, not by its last twelve metres.