Dakit-Dakit

It sits at both ends, and that is the honest answer. Moderate is the normal case and the dive is briefed as a drift on that basis. Strong is common enough to plan for: one July 2026 dive had the current running from the moment of entry and moving too fast to stop for a break. At the other end, some days there is no current at all, which is when guides start looking for macro. And it can be too much altogether. One dive here was abandoned before entry in May 2025 because of rough conditions. The current also tends to build through the afternoon, so a morning slot is the calmer bet.

Not as the site is normally run. The briefed profile puts you at about 25 m in the first minutes, beyond Open Water depth before the dive has begun, and two operators grade the site advanced outright. A competent Open Water diver can dive the shallow shoulder between 10 and 20 m on a calm day, but only as a modified profile with a guide who is running it that way, and it is not how the boat sells the dive. The certification is the smaller half of the question anyway. One operator asks for Advanced Open Water with some experience of drift diving, and that second clause is the real gate: a diver who has never been carried by water should not meet this site on a running day at any certification level.

No. Forty metres is what the terrain does, not what the dive does. The slope drops into a wall at about 25 m and the ground below keeps falling past 35 m, but nothing down there is dived. Operators put it bluntly: below 35 m there is nothing worth looking at. The standard profile drops to about 25 m and then rises gradually to 10 to 15 m as the current carries you along, and the deepest dives logged publicly here reached 27.5 m and 19.3 m. Anything below 30 m needs a deep-diving qualification and is outside what the site is sold as.

Between 10 and 30 m, and the spread has a cause you can see. Sand covers the bottom here where other sites have hard reef, so the same current that makes the dive worth doing lifts silt off it. On a strong-current day visibility can start around 10 m and clear to about 15 m by the end as you rise off the slope. On a slack day it sits at the high end of that range. If you are bringing a camera, the day that gives you clear water is also the day that gives you no drift, so pick your target before you get in.

A different dive on the same ground. Without the flow you can stop, and the slope stops being scenery moving past you. Guides use those days to hunt harlequin shrimp, and the coral heads carry nudibranchs, frogfish and a bluespotted stingray or two out on the sand between them. Operators say it directly: some days there is no current, and that is when they go looking for the small animals. Two dives at this site can be two different sports, and which one you get is decided on the morning.

Dakit means big tree in Visayan. The name belongs to a tree you can see from the boat: a small rocky islet off the east to south-east corner of Pamilacan with a tree growing on it, and the entry is right beside it. One operator puts it plainly, that they jump in close to the little tree, and the site takes its name from it. It is a separate word from Pamilacan itself, whose name comes from the hook the island's old hunters used. Note also that there is a second Dakit Dakit off Malapascua, about 200 km north, so search with Pamilacan or Bohol attached.

No. The no-take core is buoyed and diving inside it is not allowed, and the operator briefing for this site ends on exactly that instruction. It matters here more than at the island's other dives because the drift carries you toward the sanctuary, so the boundary is the downstream limit of the dive. Your guide sets the turnaround and the pickup happens before it. When conditions allow, the site is often run twice, with the second dive starting just short of where the first one surfaced.