Discover an Unforgettable Diving Adventure in Puerto Galera

The Philippines offers some of the best warm diving in all of the Indo-Pacific region. The water is warm enough to be comfortable in a dive skin or thin wetsuit; the visibility is generally very good year-round; and there is an incredible variety of marine life. One of the most popular areas to dive in the Philippines is the Sabang Peninsula, located at the northern edge of mountainous Mindoro Island. This area is usually referred to as “Puerto Galera.”

Puerto Galera (Spanish for “Port of the Galleons”) is a town on the north coast of the island of Mindoro, just south of the Sabang Peninsula. Even though this dive region is referred to as Puerto Galera, most visiting divers stay at hotels and resorts in crowded Sabang Village or in the neighboring beach communities like Big La Laguna and Small La Laguna and rarely set foot in the town of Puerto Galera at all.

For most travelers heading to ‘Puerto Galera’, the port of entry is the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. It is fairly easy to travel to Puerto Galera from Manila. Most resorts and dive centers will arrange for transportation for their guests. This involves a taxi ride from Manila south to the Port of Batangas, and a 30-minute speed boat ride to Sabang, via the Verde Island Passage.

Visiting divers must first select whom to dive with and where to stay. There are over 50 dive resorts located on or near the northern beaches of the Sabang peninsula. Most of these are located in three beachfront communities. Sabang Beach is located in the middle of the Sabang Peninsula, and while it offers the most restaurants and bars, it is by far the busiest and noisiest area. A little farther to the west, and only minutes away, is Little La Laguna Beach, and this is where the majority of the dive resorts are located. On the far western side of the Sabang Peninsula is Big La Laguna Beach, which offers wide open beach access and the quietest area, and it is still only a fifteen-minute walk from the bars, restaurants, and noise of Sabang Beach.

My preference is Scandi Divers, located on the western side of the picturesque beach community, Big La Laguna Beach. The 2025 Scuba Diving Magazine Readers Choice Awards selected ‘ScandiDivers’ as the best overall Dive Operator in the whole of the Indo-Pacific region. This sentiment was echoed by my traveling companions, who included two of my dive team members and videographers at Dive and Travel Guides, my daughter Shannon, and my friend and dive buddy Tony Martinez.

We got our first look at the resort as our speed boat/water taxi from Batangas dropped us off immediately in front of the Scandi Divers complex, located in the middle of the beachfront in Big La Laguna. We walked down the ramp from the boat into ‘calf-deep’ water, while the resort staff sorted and delivered luggage to our rooms. This is where the fun began, and we started to experience how spoiled we were going to be by the friendly and professional staff at the resort.

We checked in and headed to our comfortable accommodations, which overlooked the picturesque seaside community.

The Diving in Puerto Galera

Puerto Galera offers a terrific variety of diving which is appropriate for inexperienced divers but also offers challenging and exciting sites for experienced divers. In the gorgeous coves and bays scattered around the Sabang Peninsula, there are some 30 spectacular dive sites within 20 minutes from most of the dive operators, and of course, there are many more just a bit farther away. This diving includes shallow coral gardens, exciting current dives, wreck dives, muck dives, and beautiful, sheer walls. Scattered throughout these sites, divers will find beautiful corals, colorful feather stars, an abundance of fishes, sea turtles, and macro critters, in the heart of the Coral Triangle. The Coral Triangle is a region in the Indo-Pacific that is the habitat for 76% of known coral species around the globe, 52% of Indo-Pacific reef fishes, and 37% of the world’s reef fishes. Diving here offers the highest diversity of coral reef fishes in the world- or more than 3,000 species, and you can also find 6 of the 7 species of marine turtles. As a comparison, the Caribbean Sea has about 700 species, and Hawaii has closer to 600 species. Fortunately, the waters around Puerto Galera were declared a marine-sanctuary decades ago and have been maintained as a healthy marine environment. The countries included in the Coral Triangle are The Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, and parts of Indonesia.

The diving conditions in Puerto Galera are good to great throughout the year. Most of the diving is done from large ‘bancas,’ which are boats that have bamboo outriggers on either side of the hull. Divers enter the water via a backward roll. Ladders afford an easy means of climbing back into the boat. At the end of the dives, divers simply remove their buoyancy Compensator, tank, and weights and hand them up to a crew member before climbing up the ladder.

Puerto Galera is generally considered to be one of the best areas in the Philippines for “muck” diving, which describes an area where the seabed is covered with a layer of sediment or muck. This sediment is usually a mixture of sand, gravel, silt, and a variety of natural debris such as dead corals. While the typical “Muck Dives” are certainly not as attractive and colorful as most coral reef dives, they offer an incredible diversity of fascinating macro creatures. Probably the biggest draw of Puerto Galera is this type of dive where you can expect to find a fascinating abundance of critters displaying a vivid mix of colors and demonstrating strange physical accoutrements and jaw-dropping abilities. If you are diving a macro site, you would ordinarily expect to spend most of your bottom time and precious air, searching for critters that are masters of camouflage and therefore hard to find. Fortunately, our dive guides, Mike Medina and Leo Daliposa, were well-versed in finding the critters we had come to see, which meant that we could spend our time photographing and observing.

Through the course of our 10-day visit, we visited a few special muck dive sites hidden away in the nearby protected bays on the west side of the Sabang peninsula. The first was Montani, a fantastic muck dive site with depths from 20-50 feet, located in the Batangas Channel where there can be some current. It is recommended that you use a reef stick, to plant in the substrate to help you stay in place to photograph or just observe a subject once you find it. While our guides scoured the sand and rubble for hard-to-find trophy subjects including the highly venomous blue ring octopus, spiny seahorses, frogfish, and nudibranchs (shell-less snails) of various colors and sizes, we were able to spend most of our time taking pictures and observing. Montani is also one of the sites where you can expect to find colorful Mandarinfish coming out of their dens at dusk to pair off for a spawning dance in the water column.

The other muck dive site we enjoyed was Secret Bay, a bit deeper with depths between 35 and 60 feet. Macro photographers will delight in frequent sightings of colorful nudibranchs, frogfish, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, and a host of other treasures waiting to be discovered. Divers should stick close to the experienced dive guides, who do the yeoman’s work of tracking down the remarkable critters.

We discovered many other exceptional dive sites scattered around the shoreline of the Sabang Peninsula, which were mostly combinations of coral reefs and muck. The Scandi Divers House Reef is a sandy, rubble-strewn dive site, in relatively shallow water. This site offers a fascinating dive with lots of hard and soft corals sprinkled with multi-hued feather stars, hard corals, nudibranchs, moray eels, and an amazing variety of clownfish in their host anemones.

A little further to the east, you will come to the La Laguna Point dive site, situated between Big and Little La Laguna Beaches. There was so much to see and photograph in this area that we requested to return. There were several smaller wrecks, including the remnants of the St. Christopher Wreck, placed here to attract marine life. The surrounding reef offers an astounding abundance and variety of little critters, including shrimp, nudibranchs, sea moths, frogfish, cuttlefish, and lizardfish. The ever-present current will carry divers through an area dotted with quite a few lavishly appointed coral heads. Sea turtles can usually be found resting on the sand among the corals and near the wreck sites.

In the Sabang Resort area, west of Sabang Point, there are a few interesting wrecks. The Alma Jane is a 115ft steel-hulled cargo ship that was sunk a couple of decades ago to make an artificial reef. The wreck sits upright on a sand bottom at depths between 60 and 100 feet (12 to 30m). A mooring buoy attached to the aft area provided easy access for divers. The bridge has collapsed, and the prop has been removed, but schools of large batfish and other fishes congregate near the aft section. The interior of the wreck has been cleared of obstructions and divers can freely move about in the interior, where they will encounter schools of Cardinalfish and fusiliers. Green Sea Turtles and schools of batfish provide excellent models for wide-angle lenses.

There are also three smaller vessels, a steel-hulled yacht, and two smaller wooden boats, located close to Sabang Point. The surfaces of the wrecks and the surrounding reefs are covered with soft corals and have become a haven for macro subjects, that include moray eels, Leaf Scorpionfish, ornate ghost pipefish, and an amazing assortment of nudibranchs. To maximize your dive experience, bring a reef stick, a narrow beam dive light, and perhaps even a magnifying glass.

The sandy rubble areas near Sabang Point, just minutes away by boat, are among the best areas for close-up encounters with Peacock Mantis Shrimp, a favorite find among scuba divers. The Peacock Mantis Shrimp is a very colorful predator that has a rather impressive resume which includes the ability to smash or spear their prey with a lightning-fast ‘club-like’ appendage. Studies have shown that they can strike with a force like that of a .22 caliber bullet. While these shrimps are normally very reclusive, we had numerous encounters with them out on the open at several sites along the Sabang peninsula.

There are also many excellent dive sites to the east of Sabang Point, including Monkey Beach, West Escarceo, and Sinadigan Wall. Monkey Beach is fairly deep, dropping below 100 feet in some places. Among the highlights are a vertical wall, schooling fish, and frequent encounters with green sea turtles. There was also a bit of a current in this area. Divers may encounter stingrays, leatherjackets, small schools of surgeonfish, eels, and the occasional sea turtle. As you make your way along the wall, divers will run into the remains of the Monkey Beach wreck, which was another ship scuttled intentionally to create an artificial reef. Schools of batfish and snapper have now made the wreck their home and are not at all skittish around divers. Another site, West Escarceo, offers depths of 10 to 100 feet (3 to 30 meters) and is a favorite with photographers because it has lots of beautiful stony corals, large barrel sponges, colorful crinoids, and sea fans. Our excellent dive guides were constantly pointing out some fascinating critters as we made our way through these sites.  Sinandigan Wall, located around the northeast corner of the Sabang Peninsula, offered two separate walls that started at depths of about 45 feet and terraced deeper. Leaf Scorpionfish and varieties of frogfish seemed to like this terrain.

Verde Island Outing

One of the highlights of any Puerto Galera Diving adventure is a day trip to the walls located in the Verde Island passage. We opted to take advantage of a full day visit to Verde Island, which is in the Verde Island Passage that separates the islands of Luzon and Mindoro. This island passage has been identified as a site of the highest marine biodiversity in the Coral Triangle. Most of the endemic species in the Philippines are found in this area. It took about an hour to reach the Verde Island Wall from our resort in Puerto Galera, allowing us to take in the awesome views of the Mindoro Coastline.

As soon as we descended, the reef came alive with fish in the water column. We encountered clouds of tiny orange and pink anthias, as well as red-tooth triggerfish, filling the water column, seemingly in constant motion while feeding in the nutrient-rich water. Along the wall there was a tapestry of color, formed by soft corals, feather stars, large sea fans, and barrel sponges, which literally covered the reef surfaces.  Schools of wide-mouth mackerel, jacks, and tuna swept by in the water column. We were careful to take a close look at the surface of the sheer wall, where we found colorful nudibranchs, frogfish, anemonefish, and many other amazing critters. On a section of the sheer vertical wall, I found a variable neon nudibranch, which seemed to be leaning out over the wall to sneak a peek into the abyss. As we motored back to the Resort, we chatted a little about which had been our favorite dives during the trip. We all marveled at the incredible diversity that Puerto Galera offered, but we were especially blown away by the weird and wonderful macro world we had witnessed.