Lamanok

Lamanok is a named dive reported near Anda, Bohol. Richard Stevens describes a small wall dive under that name in an account of a March 2023 trip, reproduced in a magazine PDF hosted by Magic Oceans. This is a historical first-person report, not a current survey of the site.

The dive name may be confused with the Lamanok island visited for cave paintings. A Diving Squad account distinguishes the named dive from that cultural island. The dive’s precise location, extent and relationship to nearby named dives remain unconfirmed.

Location unresolved: The precise dive-site position has not been established. This partial guide has no map marker or navigation point; the cultural island is not a substitute location.

Depth limits, currents, visibility, water temperature, seasonal conditions, entry arrangements and diver suitability are not established here. Confirm the intended dive and current access with a local operator. No local-diver verification has been recorded by Diveity.

Reported dives under the Lamanok name

Several dated accounts describe diving under the Lamanok name as a day trip from the Anda resorts rather than a local site. Diving Squad's guide, based on an August 2023 trip, says that reaching these dives requires a 30 minute van ride from the dive resort and then a 30 minute boat ride to the dive site known as Lamanok Island, and adds that this tiny islet is not the true Lamanok Island with the cave paintings, though it lies close to it. Richard Stevens, writing in a Scuba Diver magazine feature on a March 2023 group trip that Magic Oceans hosts as a PDF, calls Lamanok probably one of the furthest dive sites from Magic Oceans, about an hour or so away, and describes a small wall dive there. Magic Oceans' own site-description sheet, uploaded in 2019, lists Lamanok Island as a slope and wall site with a 20 m depth figure and a macro camera note, and lists a separate Lamanok Sanctuary; the resort's 2025 Scubaverse profile also lists Lamanok sanctuary and Lamanok island as separate entries. Whether every account refers to the same wall is not established here.

What visitors reported seeing

The accounts agree on a critter-focused dive with modest visibility. Diving Squad reports that, because of the site's closeness to mangrove forests, visibility was pretty low at around 10 metres on that visit, and that giant cuttlefish, giant mantis shrimp and nudibranchs of every size and shape were the stars rather than the coral. Nigel Marsh, writing for Diveplanit in August 2023, says Lamanok Island has coral gardens, a reef wall and plenty of sand, and that on his dives he saw numerous oriental bluespotted maskrays, a good variety of reef fish, a flamboyant cuttlefish, robust ghostpipefish, nudibranchs, gobies and a giant frogfish. Marlon Managa of Magic Oceans, interviewed by Scubaverse in January 2020, describes a great wall and a sandy bottom that the resort nicknames Nudibranch Heaven, and names mimic octopus, wunderpus, blue ringed octopus, shrimps, crabs and rays among the animals found there. These are observations from dated visits, not a guarantee for any dive.

Seasonal access and the heritage island

Diving Squad notes that during the wet, low season of roughly May to November very few Anda dive resorts offered trips to Lamanok, and that Blue Star Dive Resort was the only one the author found running them consistently in that period; in the January to April dry season trips were easy to arrange. Diving Squad describes the island's cave paintings and a guided land tour as a separate excursion, and X-Ray Mag's May 2025 Anda feature photographs offerings displayed in a cave on the Lamanok Island Mystic Tour; that heritage context describes the island visited on land, not the dive.