Subic Bay, Philippines (January 16, 2026)
Subic Bay is a solid 3 to 4 hours north-west of Manila, Philippines. It’s home to some incredible wreck dives including the two that I did: El Capitan and the USS New York. I’m most proud, however, of my courage to rent a car (without my International Drivers License), drive in a foreign country and do all of this via WhatsApp.
Wanted a compact car, but the only one available was this beast!
The cost of the two wreck dives was an extremely reasonable 3,900 PHP (about $65 USD), but if I wanted to have someone drive me there and back from my hotel it was going to be 14,000 PHP (about $236 USD), or more than 3.5 times the cost of the dive. What? No, there had to be a better way. The “normal” rental car companies wouldn’t rent me a car because I was not a Philippines resident. But I found one that would … for a price: 5,000 PHP (about $85 USD). They would even drop it off at my hotel at 4am and pick it up at 5pm when I was back. Done!
The dive shop was called Arizona and the USS New York wreck dive required an Advanced Open Water scuba diving certification, which I have. El Capitan doesn’t require Advanced, but if you have it you can go deeper and stay down longer. I also discovered that there are at least two more certifications I’m lacking and should have: Nitrox and Wreck Tech.
Nitrox is an online eLearning course from PADI that would allow me to get off oxygen-only air tanks and dive longer at deeper depths by having a mixed tank of nitrogen and oxygen. Essentially, this allows me to avoid getting Nitrogen Narcosis which is no joke.
When I got my Advanced certification, I was taken down to 120 feet to do simple math problems whereby I failed utterly (i.e. “2+3=7”). When you see that you can’t even do simple math with Nitrogen Narcosis, you realize the danger of long exposure at deep depths. Breathing a mix that includes Nitrogen would correct this problem and help me keep my wits about me with longer (and deeper) bottom time.
El Capitan Wreck Dive:
The above video is NOT my dive. The dive shop didn’t have an underwater camera I could rent and given that I was holding a flash light though much of the dive, that’s probably a good thing. This was an incredible dive anyone can do with an Open Water certification. I highly recommend it. The shallow part of the wreck is only about 5 meters down. That means we could begin at the deepest depth (about 23 meters) and slowly travel higher to the 5 meter depth (and not even have to do a safety stop as the last part of the dive counts for the equilibrium required.
If you watch the video of someone else diving, you get a good sense of the dive. If you want the history of the ship you can read about it here. What I loved about it was that we had maximum bottom time of 50 minutes and that included going into the wreck. When you look up, you can see carbon monoxide collected on the underside of the ship (totally NOT safe to breathe). It makes for a cool shimmery look as all the expelled air from divers before me is captured there.
It’s also cool to see how the ocean has reclaimed this ship. Coral reefs have formed on it and tons of fish now claim it as their home. The whole experience was incredible. At the highest point (around 5 meters), the light was so bright not only did I NOT need my flashlight, the colors were brilliant. Mike, my guide and dive master, took me to see some giant clams which glowed purple and green. Beautiful!
USS New York Wreck
Normally, we dive the deeper wreck first. However, as the USS New York wreck is below a regular shipping lane, oil and refined petroleum tankers receive the priority over recreational divers like me. We had a window (from 11am to 12:30pm) to get in and out, so that’s what we did. My max depth was 27 meters and I was only able to stay down for 37 minutes before my extremely conservative dive computer tripped an alarm of a mandatory 3 minute safety stop and end my dive.
That’s okay, as I saw the most important parts: the gun (massive cannon fully intact), the propeller, the engine room and a swim through the hull. We entered where the ship had a hole in it (used to sink the ship instead of having it fall into the hands of the Japanese during WWII) and exited through one of the container openings.
For the full history of the ship, you can read all about it here. But here’s the highlights from the Arizona dive shop’s website:
USS New York was built in the 1890’s used was used in both WWI and WWII. Definitely one of the coolest wrecks we have here in the Subic Bay, her 8” guns are still intact where she lies at a depth of between 17-27 meters.
Agreed. The USS New York has a rich history of service and is an underwater playground for wreck divers. Unfortunately, there was a ton of silt this day and so it lacked some of the beauty and color clarity you see in the video above (again, not mine).
Four Wreck Dives in as Many Days
Between my time in Boracay and now Subic Bay, I’ve managed to secure four separate wreck dives: three ships and an airplane. If I had my Nitrox and Wreck Tech certifications, I could see spending a few weeks here (perhaps on a “live aboard”) and exploring all the planes and wrecks Subic Bay has to offer. The water is relatively warm and the visibility relatively good and the sea life has worked around all these sunken military crafts.
So what you get is a combination of wrecks and reefs (often integrated) with lots of fish. I’ve seen more clown fish tucked into anemones in these past four dives than I have in the past 122 dives (over the past 33 years of diving). Of course there were sergeant fish, angel fish, parrot fish and bright blue fish that appeared to be yellow tale blue damsels. All of this is to say, these were really amazing dives and totally worth getting up at 3:30am to take a 4 hour drive and arrive by 8:15am (and then another 4.5 hour drive back to my hotel). I love scuba diving and this was a really amazing day of wreck diving.
