Best Places to Dive in the Philippines for Recently Certified Diver?

[Luko]

Moalboal for the sardine school on Panagsama and the exceptional coral coverage on Pescador. Savedra is very good, safety oriented fo beginners (while the diving in Moalboal is very easy).
Bohol for the tons of turtles around Balicasag and the jackfish school as well. Sea Explorers is fine.
Dauin is good for small stuff and macro, personally I think Apo island sank a few years ago and thet now there is nothing that would make me come again.
If you are ready to dive in a circus arena in order to dive with whalesharks then there is Oslob which you can dive from dauin or Bohol operators.

I am not sure that if you are not prepared to dive 25m and stay as long as you can next to the bottom, Malapascua is worth diving.

For new divers - I don't think you could do better.

Bali, Indonesia. : manta rays, colorful coral, fantastic wreck, loads of fish, incredible macro. Great topside.

 

[Luko]

If your going to be in the Visayas, you need to try and dive the Sipalay city area. Its only about 3 hours by bus from Dumaguete, (some of the resorts in Sipalay will even pick you up in Dumaguete and transport you to the resort for a fee.) There are several dive resorts there with some great diving. One thing definitely better is there are a lot less divers in that area than in the Cebu and Dumaguete areas. They have over 40 dive sites (wrecks, towers, walls, sunken islands, house reefs, slopes, caves, and so on).

I like diving Sipalay but only for the deeper dives (DaWest for instance) where the fish life is denser than anywhere in the Phils. The shallower dives are not on par with the other places I mentioned.
Besides that I don't think OP is ready for such dive profiles like down to 40m bottom and 10min deco time.

 

[SCUBAMAN71]

Several sites in Sipalay that have lots to see around the 10-20 meter range.

Eva's point is a very nice wall dive around 22 meters where you can come back on the top side of the wall and see beautiful corals.

Toscana reef around 22 metres with a nice slope and wall dive as well with turtles, large bumphead wrasse, and regular frog fish sightings. Even an occasional white tip or two. It also has large corals on the shallow side.

For beginners, Disneyland, Great Canyons and Manta Drop are 3 dive sites that are shallow (6-15 meters) with corals, turtles, large grouper, small macros and occasional schools passing by. These are great for night diving as well.

At the end of Disneyland site there is a small rock I call, Pride Rock. There are usually around 10-12 Lionfish, and several leaf fish, and multiple nudibranch, all on a rock about 8-10 ft. long and about 8 ft wide. That rock is at 18.9 meters.

As Luko stated, there are also several places you can dive deep if that is what your into. MS JoJo, and SS Panay among others. But there are many walls and sunken islands, where you can dive between 18-35 meters and have a great time without having to deco.

Best part about Sipalay in my opinion is most of the time, there are less than 10 divers in that entire area diving at one time, and the majority of the sites are less than 20 minutes by boat from your resort.

I still like to dive other places, and am hoping to dive more in other areas of the Philippines later this year.

 

[Centrals]

If your going to be in the Visayas, you need to try and dive the Sipalay city area. Its only about 3 hours by bus from Dumaguete,

The place is more or less equidistant from Bacolod and Dumaguete. From my limited experience(4 trips), 6 hrs is the average between Bacolod and Sipalay(direct bus).

 

[billt4sf]

When I was a newly certified diver I wanted to dive in all the great places and see all the great things.

Now I realize that the best thing for me as a newly certified diver was to go SLOWLY: find a really easy dive spot, dive repeatedly in that area with the same buddy, same equipment, same dive guide if you can, and get all the bugs out: weighting, skills, buoyancy, maybe launching a DSMB, etc. so everything becomes muscle memory. THEN go on the dive trip of your life. You'll enjoy it much more.

Now that I have like 200 dives, I am still learning. I try to follow this whenever I have a few months between trips. I really loved Bali Amed area for this. Very nice diving, and you can stay in predictable spots. Great topside, too!

- Bill