Just spent a week holiday with wife and kids at a resort located on
Mactan Island off Cebu.

While this is the area where diving is the least interesting on Cebu, it
offers the best compromise for us in terms of location (direct flight
from Sinagpore then 15 minutes transportation) nice accomodation and
dive sites nearby (30 minutes by banca in the worst case). I could
easily do two morning dives, be back for lunch and spend the rest of the
day with the family.

Mactan Island borders the Hilutungan channel and offers lots of dive
sites. Most sites are easy wall dives with moderate drift. They are
usually located within a 100 meters from shore.The seabed is slowly
declining down to 10 meters and then the wall starts down to a depth of
45 to 80 meters depending on the location. Water is 30 degrees on the
surface and 29 degrees below.
Corals are usually plenty and quite nice but fish life is moderate and
bigger fishes scarce.
One notable exception is the dive site off Hilutungan Island, a marine
sanctuary (sound familiar? :-)). AFAIK, this sanctuary has been in
existence for five years and it shows. Entry is 1 USD per Diver /
Snorkeller. All boats are mooring on buoys, fishing/collecting of any
kind is prohibited and apparently enforced (areas adjacent to the
sanctuary are blasted into oblivion ). The only negative point in my
view is that fish feeding is not only accepted but seems to be the norm.

In addition to a great variety of small fishes, the site has schools of
Sweetlips, batfishes, juvenile barracudas, Giant Trevally. A real
enjoyment.
In addition to my dives there, we took the kids twice for a snorkelling
morning. This was their first time or real snorkelling at sea and they
enjoyed it tremendously. After about twenty minutes spent with life
vests on, they removed them and were totally at ease. Marie-Caroline (10
1/2) would free dive to 3-4 meters without any trouble, David (8) and
Ulysse (6 1/2) would limit themselves to about 2 meters but enjoyed it
nonetheless. Even Joseph (3 1/2), equipped with a life vest and a pair
of goggles had a heck of a time. Highlights for them were the juvenile
baraccudas, a baby puffer fish and a huge jellyfish ( about 50 cm wide
).

Jean-Marc

p.s. for those interested in the background of sanctuaries on Cebu, the
following link is interesting.

http://www.oneocean.org/overseas/feb99/at_olango_challenge_spells_opportunity.html