In October 2025 I did a two week long dive trip to the Philippines with my friend John. We spent both weeks at Anilao staying at Buceo Anilao Dive Resort.

There are dozens of dive sites located within 20 minutes run from the resort.

When we visited the first time in 2023, unfortunately we had a Super Typhoon hit the northern Philippines when we were there, so the Coast Guard banned all boats and diving later in the week. As such, there were many sites we could not visit till this later trip.

Batok is located about seven kilometres west-north-west from the resort on the western side of Sombero Island. The island is located north of the northern end of Marikaban Island. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 13° 41' 52.073"N 120° 49' 36.840"E (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site as the red marker. Buceo Anilao Resort way off to the right

The dive boat anchors about 200 metres off the western side of the island. The bottom is about 6 metres deep here. Once in the water, we head west to a slope which drops slowly to 12 metres. We then head south-west and then south and get deeper to 18 metres before eventually getting to about 20 metres.

The bottom is sand with some dead coral and new growth on it as well. It is very colourful with heaps of soft corals and featherstars. There are also lots of barrel sponges and some bommies.

A section of the reef	Barrel sponge

There were not that many nudibranchs but heaps of niger (blue) triggerfish and plenty of moray eels. There are piles of tropical fish, some lionfish, two soft coral crabs, hairy shrimp and more. We also saw a strange fish, turns out it was a juvenile rock mover wrasse (see photograph below).

A large gorgonia	A juvenile rock mover wrasse

We end up going east a little before turning around and heading back to the boat via a more direct route. On the way back there are more bommies that we explore.

We finish our dive in the shallows near the boat. In October the water temperature was 29C and the visibility was 20 to 30 metres. A nice dive site.

MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

A soft coral crab	Two moray eels
Porcelain crab in an anemone	A small crab in a hole in sponge
A very colourful flatworm	A mantis shrimp
Spotted Soapfish (Pogonoperca punctata)	A very small crayfish