Wreck diving in the Philippines

We had a wonderful 10 day diving in Coron, Busuanga Island in the Philippines. We were diving with the only local dive operator (always nice to sponsor local people instead of foreigners). There are 8 Japanese wrecks around Coron. They were bombed by the Americans in September 1944. Most of the wrecks were partly salvaged after WW2 by the Japanese, so the rudders, cannons and bodies have been removed on all but one of the wrecks. Most of them have been beautifully preserved and you can still see the prints of the bombs and bullets in the hole. Part of the wrecks broke when sunk or have large holes in them because of the salvaging.

We were lucky that we were diving with a small group of very experienced divers most of the time, consisting of two instructors, one dive master and us. That meant that we were able to penetrate the wrecks through tiny openings and take the more difficult routes. It is important that your buoyancy is really good, because a lot of silt has accumulated of the years in the wrecks and if you stir it all up the visibility can become very bad.

We have been diving on some of the wrecks for 2-4 times, each time with a different route through the ship. Because the ships have been lying on the bottom, some of them are quiet deep, at 38m. This means that your bottom time is very short and you can be on that specific depth for only 10 minutes. The more you ascend, the more bottom time you have. That 's why we have also done our Nitrox course here. When you dive with Nitrox you increase your bottom time because it contains less nitrogen and more oxygen.

Penetrating wrecks is quite exciting. The light is different around every corner and at different times of the day. Some wrecks lay on their side, but others are still in the right position and it is a weird idea to swim through a hallway or climb the same ladder hundreds have done before you when the ship was still active. Nature has taken over each wreck. Coral grows on the outside of each wreck but also in the inside. The fish have made it their home and sometimes get confused, they don't know what is up or down and left or right. It is quite common to see a fish swim upside down or sideways because they think they swim along the bottom.

Each wreck has it's own characteristics. Some of them still have cargo in the cargo areas. We have seen hundreds of cement bags and camouflage nets, a kitchen with pots, a cement mixer, a bulldozer on its side. The steam engines were still visible in most of them. With some of the wrecks it was possible to swim through the long corridors for 150 m, in other wrecks we went up and down through small holes and door openings to visit different rooms. Most of the wrecks have so many holes that there is always some light penetrating in the wreck. One of them is very dark because it is almost still intact.

Two days we had to help out the instructor because he had too many customers with different courses. Dolf did a buoyancy and 2 navigation dives and Annelies took two Open water students out on a dive. That was nice to do to get some additional experience as assistant instructor and we were diving for free because of the help.

The wrecks were the main attraction, but we have also been diving in a fresh water lake and a cave which is called Cathedral. The lake was interesting, because there is a volcano underneath it and the water temperature increases on your descend, from 30 to 38 degrees. There are thermoclines (temperature differences) and haloclines (salinity differences) in the water which make the visibility weird and the water gets more brackish. When other divers are in the thermocline you can only see blurry outlines, but once you're in there yourself the visibility gets better.

The lake had nice limestone cliffs.

The Cathedral cave was of a different category. We had to swim through a small tunnel in order to come in a large cave with beautiful rock formations. Hard to put on picture, but beautiful to see. We surfaced in the cave itself (half of it is above water with an opening at the top) to have a good view. The crystal in the stones made the rocks look like a starry sky and the water was perfectly clear.

The visibility was always a lot better than in Cambodia anyway, most of the time you could see more than 10 m.

The sea life not as abundant here as in other places in the Philippines. We have seen one turtle coming out of a wreck and Dolf has seen the tail of a whale shark. Unfortunately the whale shark moved away quickly and did not come back. We planned a trip to Apo reef, for the coral and the sharks and rays but there were very few trips to that area so we skipped that plan.

Philippinos are very friendly people. Their English is pretty good and it is not as poor as Cambodia. Yes they chopped a lot of forest, but there is quite still some left and they have beautiful rough coast lines, with most of the mangroves still there.

Manila is a very busy big city and the traffic is a nightmare. The American influence is clear, with a Mac Donald's and Dunkin' Donuts around every corner, but the Americans took also great care in building a good school system which means the illiteracy rate is very low. A lot of youngsters work in call centers, which means Manila is turning in a 24 hour economy, because they work at night in order to help American or European customers (that guy you talk to on the helpdesk really isn't called Jan, Klaas or John).

Environmental wise, the Philippines are much farther than Cambodia with Marine protected areas and no fishing zones where there is really only small fishing. Dynamite fishing does occur as we noticed several times while in a wreck. You hear a loud bang and the whole wreck and yourself start resonating. But this can be very far away since sound travels very far and fast under water, so it is far out of the Marine Protected Area. We saw only an occasional local with a hook on a line out of the back from his boat, but no commercial fishing going on. We have been eating some tropical fish for lunch.

We definitely enjoyed diving here, and are leaving here with a lot of regret. The last day Dolf started making a website for the diveshop to help them out, and incidentally was asked by a hotel how much it would cost to build their website. So between diving, marine conservation and IT, maybe there could be a life for us here :)