In August 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.

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

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. We decided to come back again as we didn't even do half the dive sites there are in the area, so in 2025 we spent two weeks here. This is a site we did on the second trip.

El Pinoy is located north Buceo Dive Resort, about 2.5 kilometres, near a number of other dives like Sandy Bottom. It takes about 10 minutes to get there. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 13° 42' 13.126" N 120° 52' 40.994" E (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth. The dive site is top left of the red marker (which is Sandy Bottom) Buceo Anilao Resort is bottom right.

The dive boats anchor in the shallows off the shore. There are some small bommies here with a sandy bottom. Once we enter the water we drop to six metres and then head south and then south-west. The sandy slope drops to 18 metres and then there is a wall of coral to 25 metres.

The wall with thousands of niger triggerfish and the lettuce like sponges	A closeup of a sponge and the wall

From here we go north-east for a bit following the wall. This section of the site is quite nice with lots of huge flat sponges like lettuce leaves, biggest ones I have seen, two different colours.

At the end of the wall we come back onto the top of the wall and then zig-zag south-east or east back towards the boat. On the wall there are once again thousands of niger triggerfish (also known as blue or red-tooth).

I think this is precious chromodoris (Chromodoris preciosa)	Black-rayed phyllidia (Phyllidia pista)

We see plenty of nudibranchs, but only four or five species. A few long-tailed stingrays and at least one very large fish were seen. On the way back we come across some artificial reefs. These are concrete domes, not very large. We also see some more coral bommies.

Cuthona sibogae	One of the concrete dome artificial reefs

After a bit over an hour, we are back under the boat for our safety stop. This was quite a nice dive. Water temperature was 28C in October and the visibility was around 8 to 10 metres shallow and 10 to 12 metres on the wall.

MORE PHOTOS

Girdled glossoodoris (Glossoodoris cinda)	Kunes chromodoris (Chromodoris kunei)
A blenny in a hole	Pink anemonefish in an anemone
A very cute porcupinefish	Red-netted chromodoris (Chromodoris tinctoria)
Shrimp on an anemone	Long-nosed butterflyfish