Tubbataha Reefs: The Station on the Sandbar

On 17 January 2013 a United States Navy minesweeper ran onto the South Atoll and destroyed 2,345.67 square metres of coral. On 8 April a Chinese fishing vessel carrying eleven tonnes of pangolin destroyed 3,902 — sixty-six per cent more. The twelve Chinese crew were sentenced to prison and fined 4.3 million pesos each. The United States paid compensation and no one was charged.

Silence Index — D-145

Effectively unvisited

Ranks 25 of 99 scored dossiers — quieter than 76% of the others we have scored. A low score is not a warning; it describes who else will be standing next to you.

How the total is weighted. These are the fixed weights of the four inputs, the same on every dossier — not this place’s scores. We do not publish per-input bars, because the per-input values were never recorded article by article and inventing four plausible numbers that sum to the total would be a fabrication dressed as a chart.

Footfall pressure — visitors measured against the ground that absorbs them30%

Access friction — permits, caps, seasons, boats, weather windows30%

Acoustic floor — how close the nearest engine is20%

Night darkness — how much sky is left20%

The index is a desk instrument scored by this publication, not a field measurement. How it is calculated, and where it fails.

This is a desk-researched dossier. Nobody from this publication has dived Tubbataha. It is built from the Tubbataha Management Office's own website and permit schedules, the text of Republic Act 10067 as published by LawPhil, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre's property file and news archive, IUCN's World Heritage Outlook assessment finalised in October 2025, the Saving Philippine Reefs monitoring expedition report of 2024, Philippine court and defence reporting on the two 2013 groundings, the International Maritime Organization's Particularly Sensitive Sea Area designation as reported by UNESCO and the Philippine Star, and the GeoNames gazetteer.

The regime, precisely

Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park sits in the middle of the Sulu Sea, about 152 kilometres from Puerto Princesa on the coordinates UNESCO prints for the property and GeoNames prints for the city. It is administratively part of Cagayancillo, a municipality of some seven thousand people whose town is itself 140 kilometres away in the opposite direction.

The area depends on who is counting. UNESCO's property file gives 96,828 hectares; Republic Act 10067 describes approximately 97,030 hectares including islets, seabed and airspace, covering the Tubbataha Reefs and Jessie Beazley Reef. The two-hundred-hectare gap is a boundary-definition artefact and neither figure is wrong; we print both.

The Act was signed on 6 April 2010 and it is unusually specific for a protected-area statute. The park is no-take throughout: no hunting, fishing, gathering or removal of resources, and no entry at all without prior permission. The prohibited acts run from destructive fishing methods and explosives through coral collection, anchoring on reef, dumping and littering, bioprospecting without authorisation, introduction of exotic species and poaching by foreign entities. Unauthorised entry alone carries six months to a year of imprisonment and a fine of PHP 100,000 to 300,000. Damage to coral attracts restoration costs plus an administrative fine set by the management board.

That board — the Tubbataha Protected Area Management Board — is co-chaired by the DENR regional director and the chair of the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development, and seats congressional, provincial and municipal officials, military and coast guard commanders, tourism and fisheries representatives, two academics, three NGO representatives and two community organisation representatives, on five-year terms. It is a governance structure with genuine teeth, which is why the enforcement record below is worth reading.

The money is published. The conservation fee is PHP 5,000 per visitor and PHP 500 per divemaster, with children of twelve and under exempt. Vessel entry runs PHP 5,500 for under 100 gross tons, PHP 8,250 for 101–200 and PHP 11,000 above that. Operators must apply at least two months before entry, pay conservation fees before a permit issues, and carry holding tanks and AIS transceivers. The AIS requirement is not incidental: it is how the park watches its own water.

The station on the sandbar

The most interesting object in the park is a building. The Tubbataha ranger station was constructed in 2000 on a sandbar on the North Atoll — a styrofoam-reinforced concrete structure with two patrol boats, a utility boat, radar, radio, GPS and basic research equipment.

It is permanently occupied. Rangers work two-month rotations, year round, including through the nine months when no diver is permitted anywhere near the place. IUCN's 2025 assessment records a standing complement of ten to twelve personnel drawn from the marine protected area authority, the Tubbataha Management Office, the Philippine Navy, the Philippine Coast Guard and the Cagayancillo municipal government. In 2024 they conducted 162 patrols against a requirement of 120.

The building is losing. TMO's own account describes seawater seeping into the concrete, corroding and expanding the support beams. A structure on a sandbar in the Sulu Sea is a maintenance problem that never ends, and the fact that the Philippines has kept people on it continuously for twenty-six years is the single strongest thing anyone can say about how this park is run.

Two ships, three months apart

2013 tested the law twice, and the two outcomes are not the same shape.

The USS Guardian, an Avenger-class minesweeper, ran onto the South Atoll on 17 January 2013. The US Navy's own investigation concluded the grounding was wholly preventable and attributed it to poor voyage planning and poor execution. Salvage took ten weeks; the ship was cut apart and removed, then decommissioned. The damage assessment settled at 2,345.67 square metres of coral, below an initial estimate of about 4,000. In April 2013 the Tubbataha Management Office indicated a mandatory fine under RA 10067 of roughly US$600 per square metre — not more than about US$1.4 million, around 60 million pesos. On 18 February 2015 the United States paid US$1.97 million, described as compensation, for protection and rehabilitation of the park, monitoring improvements and Coast Guard facilities. Nobody was prosecuted in a Philippine court.

On 8 April 2013 the F/V Min Long Yu grounded on the same park carrying roughly four hundred boxes of slaughtered pangolin — about eleven tonnes. It was towed off on 19 April. The damage came to 3,902 square metres, sixty-six per cent more than the Guardian's. On 5 August 2014 the Palawan Regional Trial Court convicted all twelve Chinese crew under RA 10067: six to ten years for eleven of them, twelve years for the captain, and a fine of PHP 4.3 million each — roughly US$100,000 a head at the time.

We are not going to draw the geopolitical conclusion for you, and we are not going to pretend the two cases were legally identical: a warship of a treaty ally and a foreign poaching vessel occupy different positions in international law, and the Philippines recovered more money from the American incident than its own statute would have levied. But the enforcement asymmetry is a fact, and it is usually left out of accounts that praise Tubbataha's law without noticing which defendants it reached.

The law has kept working since. IUCN records cumulative fines for RA 10067 violations reaching PHP 69,870,710.27 by 2024. And in 2016 the IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee approved, in principle, Particularly Sensitive Sea Area status for the park; the associated protective measure — an Area to be Avoided for vessels of at least 150 gross tons — was approved at MEPC 71 in July 2017 and took effect on 1 January 2018. The Sulu Sea is a major shipping route, and the park now has a line drawn around it in the rules that commercial navigation actually follows.

What an unfished reef looks like, and what it does not

Tubbataha is used as a scientific reference precisely because nobody takes anything out of it. IUCN's assessment states that it carries a higher fish biomass per unit area of reef than any reef in the Philippines, and that the 2019 national survey found the Sulu Sea bioregion highest in both coral cover and diversity. Average fish biomass in 2023 ranged from 76 to 100 tonnes per square kilometre. The Saving Philippine Reefs expedition in 2024 recorded 238.4 kg per 500 m² at Bird Islet, up from 139 in 2018; 290.1 at Lighthouse Reef, up from 133; and 168.2 at Jessie Beazley, up from 123 — increases the report characterises as very high by Philippine standards.

Coral is a more complicated story and it is not the story of an untouched place. The same 2024 expedition found living hard coral cover of 10 to 50 per cent on shallow reefs at two to three metres and 30 to 60 per cent deeper, with Jessie Beazley highest at 58.8 per cent and one shallow site — Amos Rock — rated poor at 10.4 per cent. IUCN's finding is more pointed: shallow coral cover has been declining by about 1.2 per cent a year, attributed to typhoons, bleaching and eutrophication, while deeper areas hold steadier. Fish biomass is stable in the shallows and declining at depth.

Bleaching is documented, recent and severe. IUCN records an event around the ranger station in October and November 2023, mostly affecting Acropora and Pocillopora. In 2024, bleached hard coral cover per site ranged from 0.04 to 43 per cent at five to seven metres, and fire corals bleached at 50 to 100 per cent of colonies at nearly every site assessed. IUCN rates climate change a very high threat, and marine debris high — over 800 kilogrammes a year collected in pre-Covid years, around ninety per cent plastic, at a reef 150 kilometres from the nearest land.

The overall 2025 rating is Good with some concerns. That is a real endorsement of the management and a real warning about what management cannot reach.

What popular coverage gets wrong

Three claims, all checkable.

"Tubbataha is pristine." It is unfished, which is not the same thing, and the distinction is the whole scientific value of the place. An unfished reef with declining shallow coral cover, two bleaching events in three years and 800 kilogrammes of plastic a year arriving from somewhere else is evidence about the limits of local protection. Tubbataha's rangers can stop a fishing boat. They cannot stop a marine heatwave, and IUCN says so in the threat table.

"The US Navy was fined for the grounding." It was not, in any sense a Philippine court recognises. The Tubbataha Management Office indicated a fine of about US$600 per square metre under RA 10067; what was actually transacted was a compensation payment of US$1.97 million made in February 2015, and no prosecution followed. The twelve crew of the Min Long Yu, by contrast, were convicted, imprisoned and fined 4.3 million pesos each. Both incidents are routinely cited as proof that RA 10067 has teeth. Only one of them is.

"The Philippines' only UNESCO marine site." This one survives checking, which is worth saying because it is usually asserted without any. The Philippines has six inscribed properties — three cultural, three natural — and Tubbataha is the only marine one. What does not survive is the adjacent claim you will also see, that it is the only marine World Heritage site in Southeast Asia. It is not, and it does not need to be. The distinguishing feature of Tubbataha is not its rarity on a list; it is that fewer than four thousand people a year are permitted to see it and there is a government building on a sandbar to make sure of it.

Access, cost and the three-month window

There is one way in. Liveaboard vessels depart Puerto Princesa and take ten to twelve hours each way — TMO's own figure. There is no day trip, no airstrip, no other operator model and no shore accommodation, because the only permanent structure in the park is the ranger station and it is not for you.

The season is short and it is a sea-state constraint, not a preference: outside roughly mid-March to mid-June the Sulu Sea is worked by monsoon weather that makes a 150-kilometre crossing in a liveaboard a different proposition. We could not find an official published date range from the Tubbataha Management Office and we are not going to invent one; every accredited operator publishes its own schedule and they cluster on those three months. Book on the operator's dates and check them against TMO's permit calendar.

Cost, from TMO's own visitor page: dive packages from about US$1,000 to over US$4,000 for a five to seven day trip. The PHP 5,000 conservation fee is separate and is paid on top. So is the vessel entry permit, which your operator pays and passes through. In 2024 the whole park took 3,686 visitors across 217 dive trips on 16 accredited dive boats — an average of about 37 divers a day against a modelled daily carrying capacity of 456 to 511. Tubbataha is not crowded and is not close to being crowded; it is expensive and short-seasoned, which is a different filter.

Two practical things the brochures underplay. Evacuation is not quick: you are ten to twelve hours from a hospital by boat, with no helicopter service assumed, and dive insurance covering remote evacuation is not optional here in any meaningful sense. And the requirement that vessels carry holding tanks means what it says — nothing goes over the side.

Why the Silence Index is 86

Near the top of the archive, and it is the access regime rather than the emptiness that puts it there. Footfall pressure is genuinely low in absolute terms and extraordinarily low against capacity: 3,686 people in a year, thirty-seven divers a day on a 97,000-hectare property, against a modelled ceiling more than twelve times higher. Access friction is close to maximal short of a place nobody can reach at all — a permit applied for two months ahead, a conservation fee, an accredited vessel, a twelve-hour crossing and a window of about three months. Night darkness 150 kilometres from land is as complete as the archive gets.

What keeps it off 90 is that you are not alone when you are there. A liveaboard is a floating hotel with generators, compressors and thirty other people on it, and the acoustic environment of a dive boat at anchor is not silence. And there is a permanently staffed government station a few hundred metres away, which is the best thing about this park and also a reason not to describe it as untouched.

The Traveler's Panel · checked 14 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

Status	UNESCO World Heritage 1993, extended 2009. No-take throughout
Season	Roughly mid-March to mid-June. Sea state, not preference
Only way in	Accredited liveaboard from Puerto Princesa. No day trips, no shore stay
Conservation fee	PHP 5,000 per visitor · PHP 500 per divemaster · under-12s free
Trip cost	About US$1,000 to over US$4,000 for 5–7 days, per TMO's own figures
Permits	Applied for at least two months ahead. Vessels need holding tanks and AIS
Visitors, 2024	3,686 people, 217 trips, 16 boats — about 37 divers a day

Getting there — Manila or Cebu → Puerto Princesa → accredited liveaboard → 10–12 hours across the Sulu Sea

1. Fly to Puerto Princesa from Manila, Cebu or Clark. Every Tubbataha trip starts and ends there; there is no other departure port and no airstrip in the park.
2. The crossing is 10 to 12 hours each way on the Tubbataha Management Office's own figure — usually overnight in each direction, which is why trips run five to seven days for three or four days of diving.
3. You cannot arrange this independently. Only accredited liveaboards holding TMO permits may enter, permits are applied for at least two months ahead, and conservation fees must be paid before a permit issues.
4. The season is short. Outside roughly mid-March to mid-June the Sulu Sea is worked by monsoon weather; operators do not run and the crossing is not sensible. Book on your operator's published dates.
5. Assume you are a long way from help. Ten to twelve hours from a hospital by boat is the planning assumption; carry dive insurance that explicitly covers remote evacuation and hyperbaric treatment.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

Conservation fee	PHP 5,000 per visitor · PHP 500 per divemaster · free under 12
Vessel entry permit	PHP 5,500 under 100 GT · 8,250 for 101–200 · 11,000 above
Liveaboard package	About US$1,000 to over US$4,000 for five to seven days (TMO figure)
What that does not include	Flights to Puerto Princesa, nitrox, equipment hire, insurance
Where the fee goes	The park's own management, patrols and the ranger station

What to pack

• Dive insurance covering remote evacuation and recompression. This is the one item that is not optional.
• A safety sausage, a whistle and a signalling mirror. Currents on the walls are real and the sea is large.
• Reef-safe sun protection and a rash guard rather than more sunscreen.
• Seasickness medication for the crossing, taken before you leave the dock rather than after.
• Nothing you intend to take out of the water. The park is no-take and the statute means it.

Where to stay

There is nowhere to stay in the park. The only permanent structure is the ranger station on the North Atoll sandbar, and it is not accommodation. Every visitor sleeps aboard a liveaboard for the whole trip. On land, Puerto Princesa has the full range from hostels to resorts and is where trips assemble and disperse; most operators expect you there the night before departure, which is sensible given how many Tubbataha trips have been missed by a delayed domestic flight. Cagayancillo, the municipality the park legally belongs to, is 140 kilometres away in the other direction and is not a practical base.

Safety & responsible travel

• Take nothing. Not coral, not shell, not sand. RA 10067 prohibits collection or removal of any resource anywhere in the park, and the fines are real — cumulative penalties reached nearly 70 million pesos by 2024.
• Insist your vessel uses moorings and never anchors on reef. Anchoring on the reef is a specific prohibited act under the Act.
• Nothing over the side. Holding tanks are a permit condition and the reason the park's water is what it is.
• Perfect your buoyancy before you come, not here. Shallow coral cover is already declining about 1.2 per cent a year on IUCN's assessment, and fin damage is the one impact divers control completely.
• Do not treat the ranger station as a photo stop. It is a working government post staffed on two-month rotations by people who are there the other nine months of the year too.

Nearby, and quieter

Jessie Beazley Reef, about 20 km north-west of the North Atoll, is inside the park boundary and is normally dived on the same trip; the 2024 monitoring found the highest coral cover of any surveyed site there. On Palawan itself, the Puerto-Princesa Subterranean River National Park is the country's other natural World Heritage property and is reachable as a day trip from the city. El Nido and Coron are the mainstream Palawan diving and island destinations and are entirely different in character — busy, shallow and shore-based. Nothing on Palawan is a substitute for Tubbataha and nobody should book one expecting the other.

Getting there, in order

• 1Manila or Cebu
• ↓
• 2Puerto Princesa
• ↓
• 3accredited liveaboard
• ↓
• 410–12 hours across the Sulu Sea

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, Sulu Sea, Philippines · 8.9533°N 119.8675°E · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

• Tubbataha Reefs (property centre) — the reference coordinate printed on the UNESCO property page
  8.9533°N 119.8675°E
• Tubbataha Reefs (atolls) — the gazetteer position for the north and south atolls themselves
  8.8500°N 119.9333°E
• Jessie Beazley Reef — the northern reef inside the park, highest surveyed coral cover in 2024
  9.0333°N 119.8167°E
• Puerto Princesa — the only departure port, about 152 km north-west across the Sulu Sea
  9.7333°N 118.7333°E
• Cagayancillo — the municipality the park belongs to, about 140 km east of the reefs
  9.5769°N 121.2072°E

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 14 August 2026

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park. Inscription in 1993 and extension in 2009 under criteria (vii), (ix) and (x); area of 96,828 hectares; coordinates N8°57'12" E119°52'3"; over 360 coral species and around 700 fish species; the 100 m perpendicular wall and two coral islands; and the statement that the integrity of the property rests on the no-take policies in place throughout
2. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Philippines, States Parties. That the Philippines has six inscribed properties — three cultural and three natural — and that Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park is the only marine one, with Particularly Sensitive Sea Area status for international shipping
3. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — IMO approves 'in principle' Particularly Sensitive Sea Area status for Tubbataha Reefs. The MEPC's in-principle approval on 26 April 2016; the designation of the property as an Area to be Avoided for vessels over 150 gross tons transiting the Sulu Sea; and the link drawn to the January 2013 US Navy grounding
4. Philippine Star — Tubbataha Reefs designation as sensitive sea area approved. Final approval at the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee's 71st session in July 2017 and the Area to be Avoided taking effect on 1 January 2018 for ships of at least 150 gross tonnage
5. Republic Act No. 10067 — Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park Act of 2009, via LawPhil. The park area of approximately 97,030 hectares including islets, seabed and airspace covering Tubbataha Reefs and Jessie Beazley Reef; the no-take policy and the requirement of prior permission to enter; the schedule of prohibited acts and penalties, including PHP 100,000–300,000 and six months to a year for unauthorised entry; the composition and five-year terms of the Tubbataha Protected Area Management Board; and approval on 6 April 2010
6. Tubbataha Management Office — Permits and fees. Conservation fees of PHP 5,000 per visitor and PHP 500 per divemaster with under-12s exempt; vessel entry fees of PHP 5,500, 8,250 and 11,000 by gross tonnage band; the two-month application lead time; and the requirement that vessels carry holding tanks and AIS transceivers
7. Tubbataha Management Office — Law enforcement. The ranger station as a styrofoam-reinforced concrete structure on a sandbar on the North Atoll; two-month ranger rotations year-round; two patrol boats, a utility boat, radar, radio, GPS and research equipment; the four staffing bodies — Philippine Navy, Philippine Coast Guard, Cagayancillo local government and TMO; and the IRR of RA 10067 issued October 2010 and amended in 2017
8. Tubbataha Management Office — About Tubbataha. The park given as a 97,030-hectare marine sanctuary and the country's largest marine protected area; the ranger station's construction in 2000 and the seawater corrosion of its support beams; and coral bleaching affecting up to 20 per cent of hard coral cover in 2020
9. Tubbataha Management Office — Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park and World Heritage site. The office's own visitor figures: dive packages from about US$1,000 to over US$4,000, commercial tours of five to seven days, and a sea journey of 10–12 hours each way from Puerto Princesa
10. Tubbataha Management Office — Tourism and accredited liveaboards. That only accredited liveaboards holding permits and working with TMO may carry visitors into the park
11. Tubbataha Management Office — Downloads and annual reports. The published series of annual accomplishment reports for 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025, tourism reports for 2021, 2022 and 2024, and ecosystem research and monitoring reports for 2013 to 2025
12. IUCN World Heritage Outlook — Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, 2025 assessment. A 2025 conservation outlook of Good with some concerns, finalised 11 October 2025; shallow coral cover declining about 1.2 per cent a year; 2023 average fish biomass of 76–100 t/km² and higher biomass per unit area than any reef in the Philippines; October–November 2023 bleaching around the ranger station; 2024 bleached hard coral cover of 0.04–43 per cent at 5–7 m with fire corals 50–100 per cent bleached; over 800 kg/year of marine debris, about 90 per cent plastic; 3,686 tourists on 217 dive trips from 16 dive boats in 2024 against a modelled carrying capacity of 456–511 divers a day and actual use of about 37; 162 patrols in 2024 against a requirement of 120; a standing station complement of 10–12 personnel; USS Guardian damage of 2,346 m² and Min Long Yu damage of 3,902 m²; and cumulative RA 10067 fines of PHP 69,870,710.27 by 2024
13. Coastal Conservation and Education Foundation — 31st Saving Philippine Reefs monitoring expedition to Tubbataha, 2024. Living hard coral cover of 10–50 per cent at 2–3 m and 30–60 per cent at 7–10 m; Jessie Beazley highest at 58.8 per cent and Amos Rock lowest at 10.4 per cent; fish biomass of 238.4 kg/500 m² at Bird Islet, 290.1 at Lighthouse Reef and 168.2 at Jessie Beazley, all sharply up on 2018; and the 1998 ENSO event that cut coral cover by about 22 per cent
14. Philippine Daily Inquirer — What went before: USS Guardian running aground Tubbataha Reefs. The grounding on 17 January 2013; the final damage assessment of 2,345.67 m² against an initial estimate of about 4,000 m²; the Tubbataha Management Office's April 2013 statement of a mandatory fine of roughly US$600 per square metre totalling not more than about US$1.4 million or PHP 60 million; and the ten-week salvage
15. USNI News — US pays Philippines $1.97 million for reef damage from Guardian grounding. The payment of US$1.97 million announced on 18 February 2015 for protection and rehabilitation of the park, monitoring and Coast Guard facilities, and the US Navy investigation's finding that the grounding was wholly preventable
16. Rappler — US pays Philippines P87M for Tubbataha damage. The peso value of the same February 2015 payment and the Philippine government's account of how the money was to be applied
17. Philippine Daily Inquirer — Illegal Chinese fishing ship out of Tubbataha. The F/V Min Long Yu grounding on 8 April 2013 and its removal by the tug M/T Limay on 19 April; the roughly 400 boxes of pangolin carcasses found aboard; and the detention and charging of the twelve Chinese crew for poaching and attempted bribery
18. Philippine Daily Inquirer — Palawan court convicts 12 Chinese poachers. The conviction on 5 August 2014 at the Palawan Regional Trial Court under RA 10067: six to ten years for eleven crew, twelve years for the captain, and a fine of PHP 4.3 million — about US$100,000 — for each of the accused
19. Old Salt Blog — Chinese vessel did more damage to Tubbataha Reef than USS Guardian. The contemporaneous comparison of 3,902 m² damaged by the Min Long Yu against 2,345.67 m² by the USS Guardian — 66 per cent more — and the 22,000 pounds of pangolin cargo
20. Palawan News — Tubbataha reefs facing serious case of coral bleaching. Park superintendent Angelique Songco's account of a bleaching event found on the annual 26 May–2 June monitoring run, with water at 30–31°C between 2 and 15 m, moderate bleaching at Jessie Beazley and mild to moderate on both atolls, and earlier events in 2001, 2006 and 2017 — the article carries no visible publication date and we have not assigned it a year
21. Philippine Council for Sustainable Development — Republic Act 10067. The Palawan Council for Sustainable Development's own publication of the Act, confirming its co-chairmanship of the Tubbataha Protected Area Management Board
22. GeoNames gazetteer — Tubbataha Reefs and Palawan place records. Decimal coordinates for Tubbataha Reefs, Jessie Beazley Reef, Cagayancillo and Puerto Princesa, used for the key-location points and for the distance calculations in the text

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.