Carabao Island (Boracay Alternative) Trip Report

[Bearkeley]

My husband and I just completed 6 days of diving with Vibrations Dive Center, staying at Oceans Edge Resort so thought we'd share our review. In a nutshell: Highly recommend for those visiting Boracay or those looking for a new place to dive in the Philippines.

Healthy Reef with a lot of macros, colorful soft and hard corals and always a sheltered dive site: We have dove most of the dive sites in the Philippines including Anilao, PG, Coron and most of the Visayas (Moalboal, Panglao, Dauin, sipalay, etc) and wanted to check out a new area. Carabao didn't disappoint. Despite the bad weather impacting the country, we were still able to dive many of the sites. As you can see from the pictures below, Carabao has the variety of shallow reef, deep walls and the macros you will see in other parts of the Philippines. Including our very first sighting of the Robust Ghost Pipefish! We Didn't get a chance to dive the northern part of the island due to storms in the country, but they sometimes see Mantas, but Cabilao, like many places in the Philippines is really more for macros and beautiful reef.

"Undiscovered" area - Private Diving / No other divers: Since Carabao isn't really well known as a dive destination yet, we were able to go to any of the sites on the leeward side of the island and never had to worry about other divers. There is only one dive shop on the island and although divers staying in Boracay come to some of the Carabao sites, we never saw other divers in the water! in addition to shore diving, we spent most of the time diving from a private boat with the captain, a boatman and the co-owner of Vibrations Dive Center as our guide.
The island is a tiny island with mostly locals so if you want nightlife, Carabao isn't the place to go.

Relatively easy travel to a nice resort and excellent dive op: Carabao Island is an easy 45 minute boat ride from Caticlan / Boracay Airport. Boats leave 3 times a day. We arrived in Manila and spent a couple of nights at Newport / Resorts World by the airport to adjust to the time, rest from the long flight then walked over to Terminal 3 to take a 45 minute flight on Air Asia to Caticlan Airport. A $1 ride on a tricycle to the port then off to Carabao Island.

The resort is really nice with amazing views. There is a restaurant with a good variety of food served (decent price for food despite reviews).

The dive op, Vibrations is ran by a young couple (French/Argentinian). Both are Padi Instructors and were excellent! They are both very focused On safety but are so easy going and fun to dive with and hang out with after dives. I had an issue with my equipment and had to rent theirs for a bit and the equipment was practically brand new! They also helped me fix an issue with my BCD and didn't even bother to charge me.

 

[Centrals]

Great report.
Let it be known so others can also share the joy of diving new places.
Plenty of flight from Manila/Cebu to Caticlan and there is no worry on tourist quota(Boracay only?)

 

[drrich2]

Thanks for posting a trip report on a destination I hadn't heard of; I imagine it may come in handy for somebody looking at the area.

Per Trip Advisor, Oceans Edge Resort has air conditioning, free breakfast and free Internet. You mentioned the restaurant there had a good variety and decent priced food 'despite the reviews' - wonder why others reviewed differently? Were you pleased eating there for your stay? You said it's a tiny place with mostly locals; did you eat out, or is it mainly a destination where you eat at the resort?

Vibrations Dive Center's website looks nice; it says max. 4 dives/guide. I don't see tank sizes listed; I'm guessing 80-cf tanks? Any idea whether larger tanks (e.g.: 100-cf) were available)?

Can you shore dive the house reef without a guide? I see they offer guided dives there as an option to purchase.

I see there's a night dive option on the house reef.

How many boat dives/day can you do?

Did you encounter much current often, or was it mainly no negligible?

We Didn't get a chance to dive the northern part of the island due to storms in the country, but they sometimes see Mantas, but Cabilao, like many places in the Philippines is really more for macros and beautiful reef.

What about the 'middle class' - creatures neither really large (let's say no larger than a Napoleon wrasse) not really small (let's say over 4 inches long)? Those small and mid.-size to kinda large grouper, moray eels, trigger fish, scorpionfish, crocodile fish, small sharks, colorful tropical fish schools, schools of jacks, etc...?

 

[Bearkeley]

Thanks for posting a trip report on a destination I hadn't heard of; I imagine it may come in handy for somebody looking at the area.

Per Trip Advisor, Oceans Edge Resort has air conditioning, free breakfast and free Internet. You mentioned the restaurant there had a good variety and decent priced food 'despite the reviews' - wonder why others reviewed differently? Were you pleased eating there for your stay? You said it's a tiny place with mostly locals; did you eat out, or is it mainly a destination where you eat at the resort?

Vibrations Dive Center's website looks nice; it says max. 4 dives/guide. I don't see tank sizes listed; I'm guessing 80-cf tanks? Any idea whether larger tanks (e.g.: 100-cf) were available)?

Can you shore dive the house reef without a guide? I see they offer guided dives there as an option to purchase.

I see there's a night dive option on the house reef.

How many boat dives/day can you do?

Did you encounter much current often, or was it mainly no negligible?


What about the 'middle class' - creatures neither really large (let's say no larger than a Napoleon wrasse) not really small (let's say over 4 inches long)? Those small and mid.-size to kinda large grouper, moray eels, trigger fish, scorpionfish, crocodile fish, small sharks, colorful tropical fish schools, schools of jacks, etc...?

From what we were told, Oceans Edge used to have a full organic menu that utilized food raised on-site. The pandemic put an end to it, so the menu we had was pretty good but not the fancy organic meals they used to serve. So, prices dropped with the non-organic menu. We ate all meals at the resort and were ok with it. We usually prefer to try local restaurants outside resorts when we travel but with the weather (monsoon up north and low pressure south), we decided to take it easy and just enjoy room service pre-dive, then stick around the resort for other meals. If it was sunny, we would have tried the other restaurants around the island. The ones recommended all sounded good but we got lazy!

The dive op only had 80s (I prefer 63s). Guided dives only for shore dives (normal thru out the Philippines from our experience) but probably better given the remoteness of the island and currents in case you end up outside the protected bay. They offer 2 -4 dives per day depending on weather.

The current could be strong in some areas but not where we dove. We had some, but they were great with the dive plan and we just went with it and quickly got picked up when we surfaced. Never had to fight it.

In addition to the bad weather, I also had an issue equalizing so we missed out on a couple of their favorite dive sitepic Where they have seen schools of barracudas and other schools of fish. Where we were, we also saw schools of reef fish
and a big school of mackerels...oh and yes, there were Turtles, puffers (my favorite), eels, scorpionfish and sea snakes also around.

 

[AlMitch]

Thanks for the great trip report. These are always so helpful.

I saw on a few of the pics on Trip Adv that there appears to be a small beach in front of the resort was this the case? Or is it tidally affected?

Having dived many of the other spots in the Phils, would you go back here vs say going back to one of the other places?

 

[Bearkeley]

Here's a link to our Facebook page with better pics of the beach. Even at high ide, there is a nice area to hang out above the sea wall. It's a bit rocky to lay out, but they did have chairs. There's also a nice Long Beach that the hotel can shuttle you to as well, at Lana's Beach (some cheaper accommodations there too).


We would definitely go back, mainly because it is a very pretty part of the underwater world of the Philippines (corals and life). It gives you a nice variety of what you'll see through the Philippines, sans Sharks, Mantas and whale sharks.

We are at Romblon now too and will do a review in a couple of weeks...so far, great place near Carabao if you are into macro / super macro and want to see things you've never seen before!

 

[AlMitch]

The FB post was not accessible, but thanks for the reply. We will look into Carabao for sure.
The wife and I love macro...you will find quite a few of my trip reports here on SB and many are macro oriented.
Would love to hear your take on Romblon and how it compares to the likes of Anilao and Lembeh.

 

[dirtfarmer]

The FB post was not accessible, but thanks for the reply. We will look into Carabao for sure.
The wife and I love macro...you will find quite a few of my trip reports here on SB and many are macro oriented.
Would love to hear your take on Romblon and how it compares to the likes of Anilao and Lembeh.

I've dived Romblon with 3P's, it has some really interesting and rare critters. The ghost nudi or Melibe Colmani is the most well known. When I was there there was another very rare Melibe nudi they were finding. They have some other pretty rare macro critters there also along with the more common macro subjects. The dive style was what I call free range, dive your profile/tank with the guide, and one had no problem going into deco on dives while we were shooting seahorses. When I was there the food was excellent perpared by a german ex-pat, no menu just what he created from the market that day. I was really pleased as good food can be hard to find in the PI. It not easy to get to but that may have changed flights were not going in/out daily so I took the overnight ferry which in itself was interesting, they had a live band and of course Karaoke at an outdoor bar. When I went the island was having their fiesta which was quite the experience, a big parade with lots of color, drum corps, and drunken revelry.

 

[riceowls]

It seems like Vibrations Dive Center's is now relocated to a different island. Any other operators on the island? How do you get there? I am going to be in Boracay for a meeting, but looks like dives there are not too good these days. Was thinking of going to Carabao for a day but it looks like not an easy trip. Any tips are appreciated!