Saavedra Marine Sanctuary

No. They are two dives about 1.1 kilometres apart on the same protected stretch of coast, and two separate dive operations each publish their own pair of positions for them, 1.07 and 1.20 kilometres apart in the same arrangement. Telling them apart in the water is easy even when the booking sheet is not. This dive is a coral slope that ends at a wall lip around 18 to 23 metres, with roughly a hundred giant gorgonians hanging off the wall below it and metre-long groupers underneath. Copton Point is flat sand at 20 to 22 metres, the only soft bottom on this coast, with the remains of a small aircraft on it. Fans and a wall here, sand and an aeroplane there. The names are the problem rather than the dives: this one is sold as Sanctuary, Saavedra and Ronda Bay, its neighbour as Copton Point and the Airplane Wreck, and each is occasionally described under the other's name. Book on the feature you want to see and say the word fans or the word airplane out loud.

The site works from 5 metres to 40. The shallow coral garden starts at about 5 and slopes to the lip of the wall between 18 and 23 metres depending on which stretch you drop on; the wall itself runs from that lip to 40 metres, which is where the dive ends. It is not where the terrain ends: two accounts follow the wall to about 55 metres, outside recreational range and not part of anything a centre will take you on. Figures around 15 metres circulate for this site and they describe the shallow garden only, which is the half the reputation does not rest on. Everything the site is known for, the fans, the groupers and the pygmy seahorses, sits at 23 metres and below.

Yes, and this is the clearest example on the coast of the storm's depth gradient. The gorgonians below about 23 metres are fine because they were deep enough to be out of it, and divers were still finding them intact at 35 metres and below in August 2024. The coral garden above them is another matter. A visitor grading seven Moalboal sites across ten dives in August 2024 called the shallow area here the worst he had seen in the municipality, and a diver on this stretch in July 2025 described the coral as obliterated. One general impression of the surrounding coastline from March 2024 says the opposite, but it names no site and nobody has surveyed this one since the storm. So the honest picture is inverted from most published descriptions: the deep half is the reason to come and the shallow half is the damaged one.

The opposite of the rest of Moalboal, which is the most useful planning fact about this site. The area's calm season is the dry amihan from December to April. This dive is the one to ask for from May to December, during the southwest monsoon, when swell makes the main Panagsama strip rough. It sits 7 kilometres north on a different aspect, so it stays diveable when the strip does not, and the visibility can be better then. Treat it as the alternative that saves a blown-out morning rather than a second-best option.

It is real in the way that matters underwater and thin on paper. The fenced area is closed to fishing, four independent sources call it a sanctuary, its official name is Saavedra Marine Sanctuary, and the metre-long groupers sitting at 30 metres are the visible consequence of a reef nobody takes fish from. What does not exist is the paperwork. No designating ordinance, resolution or year has been located for it, and the municipality's published register of tourism ordinances names none of its five sanctuaries. Two dive operations describe it as the earliest sanctuary in Moalboal; nothing dates or supports that. What does bind here is a 2010 municipal ordinance banning spearfishing and compressor fishing in every marine sanctuary in Moalboal, which reaches this water as a class without naming it.

Yes, and the question is really about which half of the site you get. The shallow coral garden and the turtle cleaning station between 5 and 23 metres are published as an Open Water dive, and the reef top is rated good for snorkelling. The fan wall runs from 23 to 40 metres, which is Advanced ground, and it is the entire reason the site has a name. An Open Water diver booked here on an easy grade gets the worst damaged reef in Moalboal and none of what people come for. If you hold only an Open Water card, ask the shop what depth the dive is planned to and whether the wall is on it.

There are turtles, and they are not why you book it. A cleaning station sits in the shallow garden, and accounts written before the typhoon counted as many as ten green turtles on it in a single dive, though the same accounts say plainly that this is not the best place in Moalboal to see them. The shallow water they use is also the half the typhoon flattened. Turtles are easier and shallower a few kilometres south on the main strip, where they graze the seagrass in two metres of water. Come here for the fans.