Diving in Malapascua

Cleaner wrasse pick parasites off pelagic thresher sharks at very few places in the world, and two seamounts off Malapascua, an island at the northern tip of Cebu, are among them1. The thresher is listed Endangered. On Kimud Shoal the sharks rise onto the plateau in the early morning and circle slowly while they are cleaned2, usually at 12 to 15 metres, so the dive is a long, still watch from the plateau's edge, and the boats leave between 04:30 and 06:00 to be first on the site.

Around 2022 most of the threshers drifted from Monad Shoal to Kimud, which lies 7 km further out and has a shallower, smaller plateau. Many operator pages and guidebooks still name Monad. It is dived now as the warm-up before Kimud and as the place where a tiger shark sometimes shows, which recent divers describe as perhaps once a week across the whole fleet. Hammerheads once worked Kimud; they are rare there now and mostly below 30 metres.

Closer to the beach the diving is macro. Bantigue and Ka Osting are sand and rubble sites about five minutes out, with frogfish, mimic octopus and fire urchins carrying zebra crabs, and both dive better at night than by day. Deep Slope ends in a sand dune of garden eels, with pygmy seahorses on the fans above it. At dusk the mandarinfish court on the house reefs, under red light only.

Lapus Lapus is a soft coral garden, with total coral cover measured at 76.7% in 2018 and hard coral at only 6.7%, so expect soft coral and fans over stony reef.

Gato Island, 40 to 45 minutes northwest, is a limestone islet with resident whitetip reef sharks and a banded sea krait breeding colony. After the magnitude 6.9 earthquake of September 20253 the island closed to diving for about a month. The traverse under it was still reported closed in mid-2026, while the walls, reef and whitetips are dived as usual.

The Doña Marilyn, a ferry of about 98 metres, lies on its side between about 18 and 35 metres on an otherwise sandy plain. Its hull gives coral a hard surface there and now carries black coral, and the Daanbantayan mayor has said no salvage permit will be issued over it4.

Gato Island, Monad Shoal and Lapus Lapus have been municipal Marine Reserves since 2002, under Daanbantayan Ordinance 07-2002 as amended in 2010, which bans fishing and the extraction of marine life. Five Barangay Logon sites, Bantigue and Dakit Dakit among them, are a separate category of snorkelling and no-fishing zones under Ordinance 07-2010. As of a 2018 reef survey, none of these areas had boundary markers, enforcement was lacking and illegal fishing was seen regularly. Cebu province has also penalised catching, possessing or trading any shark or ray since 2014, and in 2015 Monad Shoal and Gato Island became the country's first shark and ray sanctuary5.

Kimud Shoal answers to a different local government from the rest of the island, and its rules set how the thresher dive is run. The shoal lies in the municipal waters of Tabango, in Leyte, and Municipal Ordinance 2025-07 declared it a marine protected area, which operators have applied since the turn of 20266. Dives run between 06:00 and 14:00 and last at most 60 minutes. Open Water is the entry certification, every Open Water diver does a buoyancy workshop first, and below 50 logged dives an Open Water diver goes with an instructor or divemaster at capped group sizes. Discovery dives, Open Water training dives, snorkelling and freediving are banned there, as are lights and flash near the sharks, gloves, reef hooks and metal pointers. Bring a certification card and a logbook. Operators pay the shoal's environmental fee, and what else a quoted trip price includes, such as sanctuary and fuel charges, is set out differently by each shop, so ask what yours covers.

Fly into Mactan-Cebu and allow four to six hours door to door: three to four hours by road over about 130 km to Maya Port, then a 30 to 40 minute crossing. The coastguard stops crossings between about 16:30 and 17:30 depending on season and weather, so a late arrival at Maya usually means a night on the mainland. Dive shops are strung along Bounty Beach and the south coast, and the boats for every site leave from that beach. The Kimud trip is booked through one of those shops, and most run it as the first boat of the day and fill the rest with local dives, a dusk dive and a night dive.

Choose sites by level. The shallow reefs and muck sites suit Open Water divers. Ubang Bato and the Doña Marilyn are Advanced Open Water at the operators that publish a level, going inside the wreck needs wreck training, the Gato cavern is an overhead dive with a guide, and the Pioneer, at 52 to 56 metres, is for technical divers. Several operators recommend nitrox at Monad, Kimud, Deep Rock and Ubang Bato.

The nearest operational recompression chamber is a four-person unit at the TIEZA building in Mandaue City7; Malapascua has no chamber of its own to count on. Oxygen capacity on day boats differs from shop to shop, so ask, and carry dive insurance.