In August and September 2023 I did a three week long dive trip to the Philippines with my friend John. We spent the first week at Anilao staying at Buceo Anilao Dive Resort and the next two weeks at Sabang (Puerto Galera). We stayed at Capt'n Greggs and dived with them as well.

There are a dozen or more dive sites located within 10 minutes run from the resort.

Unfortunately we had a Super Typhoon hit the northern Philippines when we were at Anilao and lost some days diving there. We were also delayed a day in getting to Sabang.

Hole in the Wall is located just under one kilometre to the east of the resort. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 13° 31' 23.279"N 120° 59' 34.213"E (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site at right, Sabang is off to the left of the photo

The site is to the north-east of a headland that is locally known as Lighthouse Head. All dives at Sabang are done as live drops and pickups. Depending on currents, the actual drop site could be different to what we did. We also did this as a drift from further to the west than shown above. Botth dives had relatively strong currents from the west in the top 15 metres.

The Hole in the Wall	Some of the huge school of jacks we saw

We drop to the bottom at 10 metres. We head east in the current and at 16 metres we come across a huge school of jacks. We see these a number of times during the dive. On the first dive here we were really supposed to dive The Canyons and then the Hole in the Wall but our guide could not find The Canyons. WE may have hit a part of it at 27 metres where we were at 13 minutes.

This was a very colourful area. From here we ended up heading south (I think) and ascended a bit to 15 metres where we came across the Hole in the Wall. As you can see from the photograph above, this is a small tunnel straight through the rock. We enter it from the eastern side and swim through to the west. On our second dive here, we did the opposite. The entrance on the western side is very colourful.

A seawhip shrimp	A flatworm

After this we head into towards the headland and end up in five metres and do our safety stop on this nice section of reef.

We see a lot of nudibranchs on this dive, some very nice ones. This was a very enjoyable dive. Water temperature was 29C in September and the visibility varied from 15 to 20 metres.

We also did this dive starting to the north of the site and going to The Atoll first and then to the Shark Cave and then following the same route shallower. The difference was the tide was running in an opposite direction.

MORE PHOTOS

One of the nudibranchs I saw	Another nudibranch
Another nudibranchs	Another nudibranch
A pair of mating nudibranchs I saw	A hermit crab