Subic Bay

Subic Bay served as a naval base for nearly a century — Spanish, then American from 1899 until the US Navy's departure in 1992 — and that history is the diving. More than 20 charted wrecks span the 1850-built Spanish transport San Quintin (scuttled 1898) through WWII casualties to postwar scuttlings, most within a short banca ride of the Freeport waterfront. The flagship is the USS New York (ACR-2), an 1891 armored cruiser scuttled in December 1941, whose 110 m hull, deck guns, and propeller rest on their port side at 28 m. Be clear about what this is not: a reef destination. The bay is silty and ringed by rivers, so visibility runs 3-7 m on the inner-harbour wrecks and 10-15 m at the outer sites near Grande Island, and reef life is modest — schooling jacks, barracuda, lionfish, and a surprisingly rich nudibranch count fill in around the steel. The trade-off is shelter: the enclosed bay is diveable nearly year-round, which, with deep wrecks stepping down past 70 m, has made Subic one of the country's main technical and wreck-penetration training hubs. Two inner-harbour WWII wrecks — the hell ship Oryoku Maru, where hundreds of Allied POWs died in December 1944, and the Seian Maru — are war graves closed to all recreational diving by the SBMA, and since early 2026 the Oryoku Maru has been the site of a major US government remains-recovery operation. The best conditions come with the November-May dry season; June-October river runoff and typhoon weather degrade an already-low visibility further.

• The flagship wreck is the USS New York (ACR-2), an armored cruiser launched on 2 December 1891 — sister-lineage to the USS Maine — that served in the Spanish-American War and WWI under later names USS Saratoga (1911) and USS Rochester (1917). She was scuttled by the US Navy in December 1941 to keep her four 8-inch turreted guns from advancing Japanese forces, and her 110 m hull now lies on its port side at around 28 m with the guns and propeller still intact.
• The Oryoku Maru is one of WWII's infamous 'hell ships': she left Manila on 13 December 1944 with roughly 1,600 Allied prisoners of war packed into her holds and was sunk two days later off Olongapo by aircraft from USS Hornet and USS Cabot; only 128 of her POW survivors could be located by US authorities after the war. The wreck was demolished postwar to protect shipping, leaving a tangled mass at about 27 m, some 500 m from shore near a river outflow.
• Since early 2026 the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) has been conducting an underwater recovery mission at the Oryoku Maru site — described as one of its largest and most complex recovery efforts to date — to recover and identify the remains of POWs still unaccounted for. The wreck is an active war grave, not a dive site.