Shark view point

The boat runs a few minutes north from the resort beaches and drops you off the corner of the island. What comes up is sand, pale and open, flattening out between 25 and 30 metres. Coral heads and gorgonian fans stand on it with gaps in between, and water crosses the top of it on most days.

That is the dive. A guide works the fans for pygmy seahorses and the sand and rubble for ghost pipefish and nudibranchs, and your job is to hold position above while the finding gets done. There is no wall to follow and nothing to shelter behind, so much of the time here goes on finning gently into moving water and waiting.

Visibility is usually good out on the open ground and it changes at the corner. One diver logged 30 metres falling to about 20 as his group came round the point, with the current stiffening in the same place.

The finish is the shallow ground inshore, where the water eases and the seagrass starts. That same diver spent the last ten minutes of his dive in four metres of it.

Small animals in moving water. Cabilao's other dives keep those two things apart: Gorgonia Wall is the landscape, the sand under the lighthouse is the macro, and both are usually worked in still conditions. This corner puts the macro at 30 metres with current running across it, which makes it a harder dive and a different one.

The pay-off is small and specific. A diver here in 2010 got his first usable pygmy seahorse photographs on these fans, and a juvenile humphead wrasse about 75 centimetres long turned up on the same dive. What the plateau turns up sixteen years later is the same order of thing: pygmy seahorses, ghost pipefish, nudibranchs. Nothing large is part of the deal.

Divers came to Cabilao for hammerheads through the 1990s, and this corner carried the name Shark Point. The sharks were fished out, reportedly across 1999 and 2000, and nobody has reported one at the island since. By 2008, divers asking where to see hammerheads in the Philippines were being answered about Cabilao in the past tense.

The name changed in stages. One diver, writing up four dives from a 2010 stay, called it View Point and put 'formerly known as Shark Point' after it. A second diver on a different trip made the same parenthesis. What the island uses now is Current View Point, after the water rather than the animal. The old name survives on site lists, in guidebooks and in the copy that sells the island, which is why divers still arrive here expecting something the dive stopped being able to deliver a quarter of a century ago.

Plan it as a deep dive and not as a critter hunt that happens to be at 30 metres. Everything worth being here for is on the plateau, you are working against the water instead of drifting with it, and gas goes faster than it does on the island's shallow sites.

Depth is the specific risk at Cabilao and it has been named as such. Currents over the island's underwater ledges are known for disorienting divers into misjudging their depth beyond open-water limits, with the decompression risk that follows a fast ascent1. If you have read that hammerheads school here between 40 and 45 metres, treat that as advertising. It puts a depth target under a dive with no reason to go below 30.

The chain out is long. There is no chamber on Cabilao and none anywhere in Bohol belongs in a plan, because the province's own was reported resting unused in Panglao in April 2023, ten days after a resolution was passed to fund its repair1. Cabilao belongs to the municipality of Loon, whose provincial hospital is the Congressman Natalio Castillo Memorial Hospital at barangay Canhangdon. Its replacement building was still unfinished in March 2023, nine years after the earthquake wrecked the original, so ask what it can handle before you need it2. Definitive care is Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center in Tagbilaran, which from here is a boat crossing plus roughly an hour of road, and no public boat leaves the island after about six. Keep DAN Asia-Pacific, +61 8 8212 9242, somewhere you can reach it, and hold insurance that will pay for a chamber and a lift out.