Immersed and Submerged: A Sea Adventure in Coron

Aside from the famous tours like Coron Island Loop and Malcapuya, Banana, Bulog Loop tours, there are still a lot of spots and sea areas in the Calamian Group of Islands wherein you can do snorkeling and diving for you to see the underwater world from this part of the country. In fact, the best of Coron’s underwater world can be seen in these sea areas.


It was my second day in the quaint town of Coron, the main event of my travel as I will be getting into places that I haven’t been to when I first visited Coron.

After I had my breakfast at Coron Ecolodge, I was advised by the front-desk staff that the travel agent will be fetching me in a few minutes so I hurriedly fixed my things I needed for the tour. Actually, my original plan to go to Calauit Island has been ditched since there were no travel agency scheduled to do such tour on the date of my travel. Although Coron Ecolodge gave me some other options, and one of them is a tour to some of the shipwrecks, which I gladly accepted. You know, I rarely join a group tour or a packaged tour so I didn’t know what to expect by then. As a matter of fact, I was worried about my food and drinking water for the tour if I have to bring one or what. Well, good thing I was advised that food and drinking water are already included in the package. Well, I’m on a vacation right? There’s nothing to worry. 😀

I was fetched by the travel agent at around 8:30 AM; then we went to the other lodges so to fetch the other joiners of the tour. We arrived at the dock area before 9:00 AM. I boarded into the outrigger boat along with the other joiners. There are like 5 groups who joined the tour and I was the only one joined in solo.

We left the port area at around 9:00 AM and sailed the sea going to our first stop, Calumbuyan Island.

Calumbuyan Island

Calumbuyan Island is under the jurisdiction of the municipality of Busuanga. It is situated 18 miles from Coron and can be reached by boat in 2 hours. I’ve read that you can also get to this island by riding a jeep going to the village of Concepcion, and from there you can ride a boat to the island.

Actually, I never thought that this island is the Calumbuyan Island already (which is one of the islands I’ve been wanting to visit to) until one of the boatmen mentioned it. I was so glad realizing that my original travel route for this trip, except for Calauit Island, was actually happening.

The island is about ten hectares with the abundance of marine life and white beaches. A PHP 100.00 entrance fee needs to be paid per person who wish to visit this island. Since I was on a group tour, the fee was already included in the package.

There are no other tourists when we arrived on the island, just perfect to roam around and take a few shots.

After a couple of minutes roaming around, we were advised that we will be starting to snorkel. If you do follow my blog, you know that I have an eye sight problem; thus I can’t see clearly without my eyeglasses on or my contact lens on but that time I took a risk to put my contact lens on since I really wanted to see what’s the world underwater.

We were grouped into four groups which each groups was accompanied with a guide who will be guiding us during the activity. I joined the group of Mau which I felt the most approachable among the joiners. 😀

I felt so amazed as soon as I immersed myself into the water. It was so delighting seeing the world underwater clearly, and not depending anymore on the pictures I took just for me to see it clearly. 

We were asked to hold into the life buoy which will be dragged by our guide so to make it easy for us to snorkel and to explore the underwater world. Our guide was so fast that leaded to a point were I couldn’t be able to take a decent shot so I let go from the group and snorkeled by myself. After a few minutes, I was advised to get back to the group as the sea current was already getting strong.

Here are some of the underwater scenes I captured while exploring the marine life of Calumbuyan Island.

Hello there corals!

The world under the sea is so colorful more than I’ve imagined.

Certainly, the marine life is so alive yet so deadly. There’s no way I’ll get close to these sea urchins.

These look like mushrooms in the sea.

After we had spent for about an hour looking into those different sea creatures and marine life, we then went back to the shore. It was already 12:00 PM and so we took our lunch first prepared by our boatmen before we headed to our next destination.

After we had finished our lunch, we left the island and moved on to our next stop, Coral Garden.

Coral Garden

Located few hundred meters northwest of Calis Point, the south point of Coron Island is where the Sangat Coral Garden is. From Calumbuyan Island, it took us about 40 minutes to reach the area.

If you were amazed how the marine life of Calumbuyan Island is then Coral Garden features a more fascinating and wonderful underwater world. It appears to have a shallow coral garden at 13 feet which then go over the drop-off to 130 feet plus. The beautiful shallow reef is covered with different types of corals and amazing sea creatures. 

We stopped somewhere few meters away from the shore of Sangat Island and from there we started our second sea adventure. 

Here are some of the underwater images I had captured while exploring the marine life of Coral Garden. Please be advised that from this moment on, I reduced the size and quality of my pictures as I was only have few memory slots left from the camera. It was just too bad that I had used the 600 MB memory card for this camera. 🙁