Siete Pecados

Seven limestone islets sit a few hundred metres off Coron Town, and the reef joining them comes all the way up. At low tide some of the coral is less than a metre under the surface. There is no beach anywhere in the park, so the dive starts and ends at a moored boat, and what you drop into first is the shallow reef flat: table corals, patches of staghorn, rounded heads of Porites, and clouds of green chromis right under the hull.

From there the bottom slopes away gently. Most of the park runs to 12 or 15 m, sandy channels between the islets reach 18 to 20, and a few outer edges fall to about 25. The dive nearly everybody does happens between 5 and 15 m, which is where the coral cover is and where the fish are.

The fish behave like fish nobody has shot at. There has been no fishing and no anchoring here since 2005 and the difference shows in how close they let you come. Giant clams are set into the coral, two species of them. Hawksbills work the reef. At the eastern end, off the two farthest islets, a large school of barracuda has settled in, which is how Barracuda Point got its name.

That eastern corner is also where the boats are thickest.

This reef has been measured, and the numbers cut both ways. In 2016 live hard coral covered 55.4 percent of the bottom between 6 and 10 m, and 63.4 percent in the shallow band, up from 53.4 percent a decade earlier1. Fifteen butterflyfish species were recorded, more than at any of the other nine Calamianes sites surveyed that year. Sixty-one macroinvertebrate species, also the highest of the ten, and nine of them turned up here and nowhere else in the survey1.

The same survey carries the other half. Overall reef-fish density fell 71.5 percent between 2006 and 2016, from 4,932 individuals per 500 square metres to 1,404.51. Species richness across all reef fish is rated moderate. For target reef fish, the ones that get fished, it is rated very poor. The coral held. The fish did not.

In 2024 the park was given a Blue Park Silver Award2. Both of those things are true at once. Protection has kept the substrate and the invertebrate life in good condition, and it has not restored what fishing took out before 2005. That is what a well-run sanctuary in a heavily fished sea looks like from underwater.

Coron is a wreck destination with reefs attached, and this is the reef. On a wreck week it is the shallow day.

The name means seven sins. Siete Pecados is Spanish, and the version that reaches English boat boards, Seven Islands, is a mistranslation that stuck because there happen to be seven of them. Two stories are told about the name. In one, seven sisters slipped out to swim here against their parents' wishes and drowned in a sudden storm, and the islets are the sisters. In the other, seven princes were turned to stone for their sins. Neither has been recorded anywhere older than the telling of it.

The documented history is short and it is about fishing. The Calamianes was the national centre of the live reef-fish trade, and the water around these islets was used as a holding place for fish confiscated from it1. Illegal fishing had run the populations down. In 2005, on the recommendation of community members from Barangay Tagumpay village, the sanctuary was established23. A floating guard house, mooring buoys and signboards mark it now, and a local people's organisation does the watching.

More than ten boats moor on this reef at the busy hours, over coral one to two metres under the surface, with snorkellers in the water between them. That is the hazard here, not depth. Deploy an SMB before you come up, ascend on a mooring line where there is one, and come up alongside a hull where the crew can see you.

Go early. The tour fleet builds through the middle of the day and the current is calmest in the morning, so one decision fixes both. Arriving early usually means leaving the standard circuit: road to the facing shore, then a hired boat or kayak. Whatever time you go in, start up-current and let the flow carry you back over the reef, and ask the crew what the tide is doing that day.

Buoyancy matters more here than on any wreck in the bay. The coral is shallow, the cover is high, and the condition of that coral is the whole reason the dive is worth doing. Stay off it, and do not anchor. This is one of the ten established marine protected areas in the municipality of Coron4, no fishing and no anchoring are the rules that made the difference, and mooring buoys are installed for exactly that reason. A municipal tourist and environmental fee is collected in Coron, and what a trip already covers varies, so ask when you book.

One last thing, and it matters less here than on the deep wrecks. Nothing confirms a working recompression chamber anywhere in Coron. The nearest reported working chamber is in Puerto Princesa, in the same province, and no airline flies Busuanga to Puerto Princesa direct. On a reef dived at 5 to 15 m the realistic injury is a propeller strike, so check the boat carries oxygen and that the crew knows where they would take you.