Coron

Everything here runs from a boat. Wooden outriggers leave in the morning loaded with tanks and a cook, spend the day moving between moorings scattered around the bay and the islands off Busuanga's south coast, and serve lunch on deck between dives. Two or three dives is a normal day, and because the crossings take real time, operators tend to pick one cluster of sites and stay in that direction rather than criss-crossing the bay.

The water is the first surprise. This is a shallow, silty bay rather than open ocean, so light falls away fast once you are inside a hull, torches are standard rather than optional, and one careless fin stroke can put a compartment out of use for everyone behind you. The ships lie at different attitudes, some square and upright, others heeled well over, which changes how a passage reads, and the growth over the upper structures blurs the outlines rather than clarifying them.

Two things stand out beyond the hulls. Barracuda Lake is reached by climbing a short, sharp limestone ridge from the boat with your gear already on, and pays for it with fissured rock walls dropping into haze and water below the thermocline warm enough to feel like a bath; despite the name, very little lives in it. The other is the history, which is less settled than it looks: several of these ships were dived for decades under names that were later questioned or reassigned.

Coron suits divers who came for structure and are happy to spend a week on it. It is a sensible place to take wreck training, since one bay holds both easy hulls to learn on and bigger ships to use the skills on afterwards, and sidemount is common for the tighter passages. Anyone chasing reef colour or open-water fish will find the bay limited; the shallow coral sites fill an afternoon well enough, but they are not why people come.