Diving

Throughout the Philippines and even South-East Asia Malapascua is known as a diver’s highlight. Diving season is all year round. All the small marine kritter South East Asia is famous for, like numerous nudibranch species, crabs including the rare harlequin shrimp, ghostpipefish, frogfish, various seahorses and Mandarin fish are very well represented around the island. Good divesites to look for these philippine specialities are Lapus-Lapus, Bantigi or Chocolate island. But Malapascua is also the place in the Philippines to look for larger fish:
Calanggaman island, about 60 min by boat, offers superb walls and mostly excellent visibilities. Larger pelagics like eagle ray, tuna, mackerel or trevally are frequently seen.
Gato island, a marine sanctuary, about 45 min by banca from Bounty beach, is a superb critter place but also breeding ground of black banded sea snakes and home to a large population of grey bamboo and white tip reef sharks, which can be easily observed. More experienced divers may cross the small island in an underwater tunnel.
Monad shoal, a sunken island, 30 min by banca, is the place to look for large pelagigs like tuna or barracuda. There is an excellent Manta ray cleaning station and the site is world famous for daily sightings of Thresher sharks, which ascent

from deep water to their cleaning stations at about 22 m early every morning.
Large wrecks like Dona Marilyn ferry, sunk in a typhoon in 1986 and now lying in a depth of 16 – 32 m, complete the picture of Malapascua as a top diving destination.
Several PADI dive shops are conveniently located very close to the resort:
The swiss-german Sea Explorers are our direct neighbors, just a few steps away from the bar. They have been operating on Malapascua since many years and offer a complete range of diving services like daily boat trips, rental equipment and Nitrox. Sea Explorers go parallel to different destinations with two boats. PADI courses up to Divemaster level are available in english and also german language.
A bit further down the beach the british Thresher Shark Divers offer very comparable services.

Here is a collection of photographs taken by us during occasional dives over the last years, please click to enlarge: