Siargao is a tear-drop-shaped coral island of about 437 km² in
Surigao del Norte, at the north-eastern tip of Mindanao, facing the open Philippine Sea. It is
the surfing capital of the Philippines: at General Luna the reef break of
Cloud 9 - a thick, hollow right-hander over a shallow shelf, reached by a wooden
boardwalk - draws the annual Siargao Cup and surfers from around the world. Inland the land
barely rises: Mount Baliuko, the island's high point, reaches just 158 m.
The island is layered geology - a Cretaceous ophiolite floor, a Miocene sedimentary
formation, and a cap of Pleistocene reef limestone. Around its coast lie the set-pieces
of every island-hopping day: the emerald Sugba Lagoon in the west, the tidal
Magpupungko Rock Pools that surface only at low tide, and the sandbars of
Naked, Guyam and Daku. Del Carmen holds one of the largest
mangrove reserves in Mindanao - 4,871 hectares, a Ramsar wetland. The whole
archipelago was declared a protected landscape and seascape in 2018.
Dive below the surface. Orbit the camera down through the water. No open bathymetric
service covers these reefs at this resolution, so the underwater relief is modeled from
distance-to-shore: pale turquoise over the fringing reef, deepening fast into the open ocean -
for Siargao's Pacific-facing coast sits on the edge of the Philippine Trench, one of
the deepest ocean trenches on Earth, which is exactly why the groundswell reaches Cloud 9 with
such power. In December 2021, Typhoon Rai (Odette) tore across the island; it has since
rebuilt.