Mapating Rock

The rock never breaks the surface, and on a cloudy day the boat may not find it. Crews have located Mapating by lining up landmarks on distant land, one set of which a typhoon took down, so the dive starts with a clear morning and a captain who has been before.

Everything after that happens in blue water. You go in over open sea and drop onto a target you cannot see, watching the current the whole way down, aiming for the top of the rock at 18 metres1. What you land on is flat, covered in rubble and not much to look at. Keep swimming west.

The drop-off is the dive. It falls away in steps to around 40 metres, and the current that keeps most divers away is the same current that puts fish on the wall. Pelagics pass through. The steps are where a recreational diver turns.

Below that the cliff keeps going. At 45 metres a black opening about 10 metres across appears in the face, with the statue of a mermaid set beside it1. Marble rays work the ground around the mouth and hang their eggs on the outside of it. That is where one dive ends and a different qualification starts.

Anilao is a macro coast. Divers come here for animals two centimetres long on black sand, and the whole strip is organised around that. Mapating is the exception: an offshore rock where the interesting direction is outward, and where the thing at the bottom of the wall is an entrance big enough to swim a team through.

The cave gives the site its reputation and it is not a look-inside option. The mouth sits at 45 metres1, which is already past the recreational dive. The passage runs in about 10 metres to a junction and narrows into two tunnels. A restriction near 46 metres has to be passed by taking gear off and pushing it in front of you. Deeper again, a chamber is reported past 60 metres on figures nobody surveyed. From the entrance inward this is overhead, deco-planned technical diving, and the training and gas are the whole price of admission.

The detail divers repeat about the interior is the dark. At the end of one tunnel a team switches every light off and waits about five minutes, and flashlight fish come out of the walls1. Nothing else on this coast does that.

It is also the Anilao dive most Anilao divers have never done. Depth, distance and current keep it off the day plan, and the local diving community says so about itself.

Pating is Tagalog for shark, and mapating reads as lots of sharks. The name came from fishermen who told stories of sharks stealing their catch off the line as they hauled it in, and from the first divers to work the rock, who found the area around the cave entrance full of sleeping whitetips1. Both stories are about the past.

The sharks are gone1. Overfishing is the reason given. Divers who started here in the mid-1990s remember a rock you went to for sharks, and by the end of the 2000s local divers were reporting none. A name is not evidence, and this is the clearest case on the coast of a site whose reputation runs ahead of what is in the water.

The cave has a shorter history and a narrower one. Local technical divers were working it through the 1990s, when Philippine technical diving was itself getting started, and it has stayed their dive since. Recreational traffic here has always been the wall above it.

The window is November to May, and in practice it is narrower than that. From about June to October the southwest monsoon blows onto this side of Maricaban, which is the exposed face, and this crossing is the first thing an operator drops when the sea gets up. The sheltered fallback dives are a long run back the other way.

Then the tide. Slack water is not a refinement here, it is the plan1. Local divers describe the current as extremely strong, the boats that run it call it fierce, and both the descent and the ascent happen with nothing to hold. Fighting flow in open water costs gas at the two points in the dive where you can least afford it. A moderate rating does circulate for the site. Treat it as the outlier.

An SMB goes up before you leave the bottom. The boat has to find you in open sea, and it has already had trouble finding the rock once that day. A torch earns its place on the drop-off, and anyone going near the mouth needs a primary and a backup, checked at the entrance1.

Settle the evacuation question before you book. Anilao has no chamber evidenced as being in service. The closest facility anyone can show is working lies on the far side of Metro Manila, roughly 140 kilometres from this coast and two and a half to three hours of driving, which begins only once a banca leg of 15 to 30 minutes is done. Add about 20 minutes on top for this rock, since the strait has to be recrossed first. On the deepest dive on the coast that chain is part of the plan. Cover for a chamber and for the transfer to it is the most consequential thing to arrange before this trip, ask what oxygen the boat carries, and put the DAN Asia-Pacific Diving Emergency Service in your phone before you travel: +61 8 8212 9242.