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.

Mainit School is located around the point from the resort just past where you normally get picked up when you first arrive at the resort. It is located right off the Mainit Elementary School, hence its name. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 13° 41' 25.498"N 120° 54' 10.476"E (using WGS84 as the datum). It is about 7 minutes from the resort to this site.

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site (red marker). Buceo Anilao Resort at left

The dive boat anchors off the school in about 6 metres. The bottom is sand with some coral bommies. The bottom slopes to the south-west to about 18 metres. Here we headed south-east parallel to the shore.

As is usual for most sites here, there were thousands of niger triggerfish (also known as blue or red-tooth). The bottom is sand with lots of small coral outcrops. There were lots of nudibranchs, two moray eels, a few shrimp on various things like sea whips and starfish. The sea whips also had gobies.

A huge tractor tyre on the sand	A goby on a sea whip

There were crabs on hard corals, some lionfish and plenty of tropical fish. After about 40 minutes we came back across the shallower sand where there were lots of small barrel sponges.

A very common nudibranch	The red on these nudibranchs is a brilliant red under a torch

We finished our dive in the shallows. In October the water temperature was 29C and the visibility was very poor in the shallows but still only 3 to 4 metres deeper. I think the strong 20 knot winds earlier had stirred up the bottom in the shallows and this had descended over the site. Despite this, it was a good dive site.

MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

A rarer nudibranch with its eggs	A very tiny nudibranch
A shrimp in a sponge	A glass shimp on a bubble anemone
A clownfish in an anemone	Two shrimp on a sea whip