Sepok Wall

The dive runs from about 5 metres on the coral garden at the top of the wall to about 27 at the foot of the face, and most of it happens in the upper half of that. Twenty-seven metres is where two independent lines land: an operator table that prints it directly, and a separate chart giving a maximum of 90 feet, which converts to 27.4. Read a chart figure as the deepest that shop takes the dive rather than the deepest the terrain goes, which makes it a floor and not a ceiling. No logged dive-computer profile for this site has been located, and a logged profile would outrank both charts if one turned up. One published figure gives 5 to 30 metres, but it is quoted for a two-site area and not for the wall on its own, so it is not evidence that the dive goes deeper.

The top of it is, and the bottom of it is not, and this is the one thing worth getting straight before the boat leaves. The coral garden sits at about 5 metres and is genuinely shallow ground that snorkellers work at the same time as divers. The wall face below it runs to about 27 metres, past the 18 an Open Water card authorises. Descriptions that call this a normally easy and very pretty dive are accurate about the shallow half and are describing a site that can also get rough in strong current. Advanced Open Water covers the whole face. An Open Water diver has a real dive here without going deeper, and should say so to the guide instead of following the group down.

Last measured, it had collapsed in the shallows, and nobody has published a comparable measurement since. Monitoring on this coast recorded shallow live hard coral cover of 62.7 percent in 2005 and 4.7 percent in 2011. Two separate series are involved and they are easy to confuse: the shallow transects at 2 to 3 metres are the ones that fell from 62.7 to 4.7, while the deeper transects at 7 to 8 metres fell from 36.8 percent to 14.6 over the same six years. The 2011 report attributes the loss to a major storm in 2008, a crown of thorns outbreak and anchor damage in the deeper water, and notes that the deep figure was still an increase on 2001. The same work recorded reef fish diversity falling from 41.6 to 32.0 species per 500 square metres, and the 2005 survey had already recorded large wrasses as absent from the site and put that down to fishing pressure. Fifteen years have now passed. Whether the shallow coral has come back is genuinely unknown, and a diver who goes should treat both the lush descriptions and the collapse figure as dated.

No. Reef monitoring on this coast lists it as a non-MPA site in both 2005 and 2011, and it is worth stating plainly because the opposite claim circulates. It is also not in Mabini. Sepoc Point is filed under Tingloy municipality, alongside Sombrero Island, Layag-Layag and Batalang Bato. The four named no-fishing sanctuaries on this coast are Arthur's Rock, Twin Rocks, Cathedral Rock and Batalang Bato. Sepoc has a long paper trail without protection at the end of it: a 1978 national declaration made the islands and reefs a tourism zone with restrictions on development and on spear-fishing using scuba, a 1980 survey proposed that Sombrero, Sepoc and Layag-Layag be included in a national marine park, and the proposal was promoted in 1982 and never enacted. In 2011 the same recommendation was still being made.

It has two settings and the honest answer names both. Most of the time it is a medium flow that carries you along the face, which is what makes this an easy wall to put a newer diver on. It can also run strong enough to make the dive rough, and centres grading the site put it at moderate to strong. Nothing reliable is on record about which way it sets, so the direction is a question for the guide on the morning and not something to plan from a page. Practically that means two things: check the water before you commit, and expect the site to be swapped when it is running.

No, and the names get mixed together constantly. Sepoc Point is the headland at the north-western tip of Maricaban Island and the name of the reef around it, which is what the survey work refers to. Sepok Wall is the wall dive west of that headland: a coral garden at about 5 metres on top of a rock face dropping to about 27. There is also a third, shallower and low-current dive at the point itself, listed under names including Sepoc 2, and the descriptions of it disagree enough that it is not treated as the same site as either of the others. The spelling splits too. Sepoc and Sepok are both in current use and neither is wrong.

Metro Manila, about 140 kilometres out and two and a half to three hours of driving. Nothing in Anilao itself can be shown to be a working chamber. What is different about this site is where the delay sits: it is on the Tingloy side of the water, so a strait crossing of roughly 20 minutes comes before the 15 to 30 minute banca run that every Anilao dive needs, and the driving starts only after both. Nobody publishes an honest door-to-door figure. The practical response is insurance that pays for hyperbaric treatment and for the transfer to it, a check that the boat carries oxygen, and the DAN Asia-Pacific Diving Emergency Service number stored before you travel: +61 8 8212 9242.