Mato Point

Portulano lists Mato among its nearby dive destinations. Pacific Blue uses Mato, Aqua-Venture lists Matu Rock (Matutungil), and REEF has a Matu Rock survey name. DAN’s 2017 firsthand account describes Matu Point near Anilao Harbor. This partial guide retains that naming evidence without treating an old dive report as a current observation.

Sources use Mato, Matu Point and Matu Rock. Aqua-Venture explicitly pairs Matu Rock with Matutungil, but equivalence across every spelling and the precise reef position remain unverified. No additional record is created for those variants.

Location unresolved: The exact dive-site position has not been established for this partial guide. It has no map marker or navigation point.

Depth, current strength, visibility, seasonal conditions, entry arrangements and diver suitability remain unknown in this partial guide. Confirm the intended site and current access with a local operator before planning a dive. No local-diver verification has been recorded.

What the dated accounts describe

The Divers Alert Network article On the Hunt, published August 2017, describes Matu Point near the entrance of Anilao Harbor as giant boulders rising above the surface that create shallow walls leading to a long rocky, silty slope with no real coral growth or sponge life and only a few anemones. On that visit the author counted at least 11 fire urchins carrying Coleman shrimp, plus zebra crabs, hairy algae shrimp in 12 feet of water, nudibranchs on the wall, frogfish, juvenile boxfish, young sweetlips, golden chain morays, a blue tunicate shrimp and several Oliver's squat lobsters. The diver's blog How Now Brownpau, posted January 2020 about a late-afternoon dive on 29 December 2019, says Matu Point is short for Matutunggil and sits by a large rock just off a corner of Balayan Bay amid the densest strip of Anilao dive resorts; it describes a rocky wall with boulders dotted with coral, anemones and a friendly sea turtle, with a maximum depth of 94 feet on that profile. Dive Happy's Anilao article, first published June 2017, calls Mato Point a relatively new site nicknamed Too Many Frogfish after eight frogfish were found within a five square metre area on a near vertical wall.

Operator and photographer listings

Pacific Blue's Japanese-language page, in a Wayback Machine snapshot of 17 May 2026, lists Mato at 1 to 25 m, 15 minutes from its resort, below a pointed vertical rock whose wall continues to about 5 m with gobies and frogfish, then a sandy slope where flasher wrasse courtship is sometimes seen. Aqua-Venture lists Matu Rock (Matutungil) at 18 m with slight current on a slope with sandy bottom and rock, for macro lenses. Portulano's FAQ puts Mato about 20 minutes from its resort by outrigger. A photographer's entry for Matutunggil hill on underwaterphotography.com describes a rock formation by Outrigger dive resort and a great macro site, listing catshark, giant red frogfish, zebra crabs, Coleman shrimp, blue ribbon moray and squat lobsters, with typical depth 0 to 40 m and visibility 10 to 30 m; a separate Matu entry on the same site gives 0 to 30 m and 3 to 10 m. REEF's survey database lists Matu Rock (Luzon) with one survey. Spellings and depth figures differ across these records and remain unreconciled.