Pungtud Wall

There is no buoy to tie to. The boatman lines up a fishing hut standing on pillars in the water with Panglao's south point, and where those two meet is where you get in.

The top of the wall is three to five metres down, so you are over coral within seconds: hard and soft, anemones, small fish everywhere. The wall stays on your right shoulder heading northwest. The dive is spent between seven and fifteen metres, working along the face and looking into the small caves and overhangs with a torch. Below twenty-five metres the face gives onto a sandy slope that drops away quickly, and the published advice is to set your floor at twenty-five and not follow it.

The route finishes back over the shallow sand pads at about four metres, where corals and plenty of fish make the last stop part of the dive. A slight current can set against you on this return leg. If it starts to cost you, the briefing's answer is to come back in shallow water heading south, so keep gas for it.

Sea fans and soft coral cover the face, and anthias hang in numbers over the coral garden on the wall top. Frogfish, nudibranchs, lionfish and scorpionfish turn up along the shallow ground, ribbon eels come out of the rock, and barracuda patrol the open water off the wall, often named and never guaranteed.

The site is usually sold on a boat day to the western shoulder, with Doljo and Gak-Ang, and an Open Water card covers the whole of the dive as it is run.

Puntod Island, which this site is named after, reopened in February 2026 under written marine tourism guidelines for the Panglao Island Protected Seascape1. They change your day, so go through them with your operator when you book. Every tourist boat docks at Puntod Island as the single entry and exit point, and visitors register, pay an entrance fee and attend a compulsory environmental briefing before anyone gets in the water2. Snorkelling and diving are capped at two hours of interaction time, accredited guides go with you, and the island runs from six in the morning to six in the evening2. The fee is a question for your operator at booking. So is the boundary: the wall the shops dive is published about 2 km north of the island, and whether the island's rules reach it is worth settling before the boat leaves.

The rules follow a closure. Names were found carved into corals at the island's snorkelling and scuba site3, the mayor closed that site by Executive Order No. 5 of 2 September 20244, and from 9 September all tourist activity on the island stopped for a period expected to run from six months to over a year3.

Bring a torch: the caves and overhangs along the face at working depth are dark inside and looked into from outside. They are small cavities, not an overhead environment.