Alona Beach

Five metres down, sand and scattered coral heads, snorkellers overhead and a beach a hundred metres behind you. Three minutes in, the bottom edges away and the wall starts at eight.

It is not a dramatic wall. It steps down in ledges, cut through with vertical fissures, and you can run it on either shoulder, which is exactly what a reef used for training needs. The dive is spent in those cuts. Frogfish sit in the coral, scorpionfish and stonefish sit closer to the sand than you would like, moray eels fill the crevices, nudibranchs are everywhere, and mantis shrimp work the rubble. Ghost pipefish are the prize, and finding them depends entirely on the guide.

At twenty metres the wall gives out onto a sandy slope. It carries on to about twenty-five and there is very little reason to follow it, which the shops here say out loud.

The other half of the dive is above you. Mooring lines drop from the surface to the reef, small boats come and go all day, and the ascent needs more thought than the descent did.

Almost every diver who dives Panglao dives this reef, and almost none of them choose it. It is the check dive, the course, the try dive, and the tank the boat runs when wind has closed something better. That gives it a strange status: the island's most-dived water is also the one nobody books a trip for.

What it earns on its own is close range. The strip is a boat-dive coast where the good sites are twenty minutes to an hour away, and this is the dive you can walk into, or reach in a minute, or do at seven in the evening after the bangkas have stopped. For a macro photographer that combination is worth more than a better reef an hour away.

The cost is written into the water. A mooring field sits over the coral, the daily traffic keeps the visibility floor lower here than anywhere else on Panglao, and the centre on the beach says in its own words that the ropes have damaged some of the coral. The divers who know it best split the difference. Pleasant rather than spectacular, they say, with the critters carrying the dive. Two of them, five years apart, thought the local Alona reefs had got thinner. Both readings have held for six years, and neither has driven anybody off the reef.

The depth number on this site is misleading and it is worth understanding before you look at it. Twenty-five metres is the sandy slope under the base of the wall, not the dive. The wall is 8 to 20, the working band is 5 to 18, and an Open Water diver never goes near their limit here. Nobody sells the ground below 24 metres, because there is nothing on it.

Give the ascent the attention you would normally give the bottom. You are surfacing under a working mooring field with small boats crossing it, so come up on a line or under the guide, send an SMB if you are anywhere in open water, and do not drift the last stop.

Dive it early, or dive it at night. Those are the two windows where the water has not already been stirred by wind or by everybody else, and the night dive is the better dive by common consent: basket stars open, the ghost pipefish are easier to find, and nothing is running over your head.

One piece of local geography is worth knowing and it is unusually good news. The coast guard sub-station for these waters is in Tawala, on the beach this reef sits off. For a hospital with an emergency department, it is Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center in Tagbilaran, on (038) 411-4868, and the station answers on 0927-350-5484. No dive on Panglao is closer to help than this one.