Chocolate Island

The boat turns away from Malapascua for this one, out toward the mainland for 20 to 35 minutes, and stops at an uninhabited islet in open water. The dive works its perimeter between two lines. At the bottom, 16 to 18 metres down, the slope runs out into sand and rubble. At the top, five metres or so against the rock, soft and leather corals sit thickest, with barrel sponges and fans among them.

Nothing on the site is deep, so the profile is long and slow and it is gas, not no-decompression time, that ends it. Guides work it like a search rather than a tour, stopping and staring, and how much you come away with depends almost entirely on who is leading.

Where the water is moving, the method is to put the island between you and it. There is always some part of the fringe out of the flow, so a current here changes which side you start on rather than whether you dive.

Rock and boulder under soft coral is not what the rest of the inshore diving here looks like. The macro circuit five minutes off Bounty Beach runs on sand and rubble, close enough to muck that divers reach for Lembeh as the comparison, and one of the neighbouring sites is a garden eel dune. This one gives you the same critters against a living reef.

It divides opinion, and both readings are worth carrying. A diver on his sixth trip to the island made it the highlight of the lot, describing corals he had not come across before and over a hundred frames from a single dive1. Others come back cooler about it, calling it a reasonable reef with some nice macro on it. It is a good shallow coral dive that rewards patience, and how far it goes past that depends on what you are hunting.

The name is a local joke with no punchline, and the people who dive it most say so in print. Ask on the beach and you get the island looks like chocolate, or the island used to make chocolate. None of those stories are true, and the origin remains a mystery2.

The site's one documented episode is scientific. A community conservation project running on Malapascua collected biophysical data at exactly three dive sites: Monad Shoal, Gato Island and this one3. The other two are the island's marquee shark dives, monitored because of the animals over them. This one is a shallow coral fringe that no diver comes to for a shark, and it still made the list. Whatever the surveys found stayed inside the project.

Bring macro and bring patience: the argument for coming this far out is that the reef holds still and lets you work. A shallow profile means a long dive, and a long dive on a small perimeter means frame counts that get silly1.

The two ends of the slope ask for different things. Down on the sand and rubble the subjects are the hunted ones, frogfish and cuttlefish, and they need the guide as much as the lens. Up in the coral at five metres there is ambient light enough to work without fighting for it, and enough structure to put something behind a wide shot.

Nudibranchs are the reason to come back rather than the reason to come once. One instructor diving the site over six months kept finding species she had not seen before, including a sea hare a guest described as a flying nudibranch with a skirt2. What is here in March is not what is here in September.

Open Water covers it, which is why centres use it as the unhurried dive of the day and bring divers still in training and people back after a break. Ask which side of the island you are starting on: current can run, and the briefing will already have decided.

This is a boat trip away from the island rather than around it, so it lands on the schedule after the morning shark boat is back. That also makes a night dive here a deliberate arrangement rather than something you decide at dinner.

Skip the nitrox. Centres keep it for the shoals and the deeper pinnacles, and at 18 metres there is nothing for it to buy.

One area fact applies out here as it does to every dive run from Malapascua. The island has no working chamber, and reaching one means hours of boat and road on the mainland. At 16 to 18 metres that argues for dive insurance and for checking what emergency oxygen your boat has aboard, rather than for changing the dive.