El Nido & Bacuit Bay

Diving here is a day-boat routine out of El Nido town, where the operators cluster on Hama Street a few steps from the beach. Speedboats and bangkas cross Bacuit Bay to moorings among the limestone islands, with the closest sites off Miniloc Island about 10 minutes out by speedboat and 20 by bangka. More than 30 named sites sit inside the El Nido–Taytay Managed Resource Protected Area, a 903 sq km reserve established in 1998 that is 60 percent marine, and the municipality collects an environmental fee in town.

Most of the bay's diving is gentle reef. Sites like Popolcan and Nat Nat begin on coral gardens at 5–10 m and slope away, and the Miniloc Island pair of South Miniloc and Twin Rocks hold between 13 and 21 m over lettuce corals, sponges and sandy bottoms worked by stingrays. The limestone shows underwater too: Entalula's face drops vertically to 30–35 m, Paglugaban's boulders are cut with swim-throughs, and Dilumacad Island hides a roughly 40 m tunnel lit through holes in its ceiling. Nudibranchs, shrimp and crabs fill out the small stuff, with seahorses turning up on night dives.

It suits new and improving divers best. The Miniloc sites are calm and sheltered year-round, Paradise is a 6 m sandy training site with pool-like conditions, and Discover Scuba dives take the uncertified into the bay, so a course or a first run of sea dives sits naturally here. North Rock, dived only in favourable currents, and the deeper walls give experienced divers something to work with, but anyone whose trip is built around wrecks should take the ferry to Coron, three and a half hours north, where the WWII fleet lies.