Habagat Wreck

The site is a sandy slope with a boat on it, and the dive is shaped by that: you drop in over the shallows off the western end of Alona, follow the sand down, and the hull comes out of the blue somewhere around 35 m. Because the bottom keeps going, this is a dive where the plan matters more than the wreck — bottom time at that depth is short, most operators run it on nitrox, and the ascent is spent back up the slope rather than hanging in open water.

The hull itself is small and thoroughly colonised, soft corals and sponges over the plating, and it works the way small wrecks usually do: as a piece of structure on an otherwise featureless bottom that everything else collects around. Yellow snapper and batfish hold over it, groupers and lionfish sit in the shadow of the plating, and frogfish turn up on the encrusted surfaces. There are a few small caves in the wall near the wreck where groupers and snappers hide.

It is also the reason Panglao can offer a deep dive at all without a long boat ride: the site is barely a kilometre offshore, under five minutes from the beach, and shops run it as the second tank of an ordinary morning. Divers without the depth certification are taken to the coral and fish on the slope at around 12 m instead, which is a decent dive in its own right and shares the mooring.