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.

Bethlehem is located about six kilometres east-south-east from the resort across the passage off Marikaban Island. It is located right in the entrance to the passage between Marikaban Island and Caban Island and off the village of Bethlehem. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 13° 40' 22.562"N 120° 50' 29.000"E (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site which is below the bottom of Caban Island. Buceo Anilao Resort at top right

The dive boat uses a mooring a short distance off the south-eastern end of the village. The bottom is only 3 metres deep here and then slopes to 18 metres before dropping over a small wall to 20+ metres. The bottom is sand with some coral and rock rubble. Deeper there are some larger coral pieces with sponges and featherstars.

We did this on an incoming tide so it was a bit harder as we swam east from the bottom of the slope. Saw lots of nudibranchs and some shrimp, including ones on fire urchins (which were everywhere). I also saw some long-finned bannerfish and a few Moorish idols.

A rarer nudibranch with its eggs	A quite colourful nudibranch

After about 40 minutes we came back a little shallower to the boat. To be honest, this was probably the least interesting dive I did in Anilao, not a huge amount to see and I only took perhaps 15 photographs the whole dive.

Not so common but seen often	Very common at Anilao

We finished our dive in the shallows. In October the water temperature was 28C and the visibility was only 8 to 10 metres. An average dive site.

MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

A very small but active nudibranch	A tiny crab on a hard coral
Shrimp on fire urchin	A starfish shrimp