Lapus Lapus

The dive is worked between about 10 and 18 metres, it finishes on a soft coral garden at 8, and the deepest anyone describes going on it is 22 metres where the slope runs out into sand. You will also meet 15 metres and 25 metres in print. The 25 comes from a chart that prints the same figure on four different dives around this island, and the 15 has no dive account behind it at all. Nothing here is deep. The number that matters is the one your group agrees on before the entry, because nothing on the slope marks it for you.

Yes. It has carried Marine Reserve status since 2002 under a Daanbantayan municipal ordinance, amended in 2010, and the same instrument covers Monad Shoal and Gato Island. What the ordinances prohibit is fishing and the extraction of marine life, so no permit, quota or fee attaches to diving it. What the designation does not come with is anything on the water. No buoys or markers delineate this reserve, no boundary has been published, and enforcement across the municipality's protected areas was recorded as lacking, with illegal fishing seen regularly. Dive it as a reserve, because it is one, and do not expect it to be policed like one.

Ask, because there are three. Operators on Malapascua sell Lapus Lapus, Lapus II and Lapus Pinnacle as separate dives with separate briefings, and the other two describe different terrain and different depths from this one. Some shops shorten them to Lapus 1 and Lapus 2, which compounds the confusion. This page is Lapus Lapus proper, the reef off the north west point. If a boat plan just says Lapus, that is not enough to know what you are diving.

Conditions decide it, and the local framing says exactly that: the dive suits beginners and experienced divers alike, depending on the current and the sea state that day. The shallow version, the reef top and the garden between 8 and 18 metres, is an Open Water dive and is run as one. The rest does not stay inside those limits. The bottom edge at 22 metres is past the Open Water ceiling, and the return leg after about an hour reliably has current in it on a site with nothing fixed to hold or ascend on. A new diver who is comfortable in moving water will enjoy it. One who is not should dive it shallow or dive it another day.

It means the reef surface is almost entirely covered in living coral, and it means almost none of that coral is hard. The 2018 survey put total coral cover at 76.7%, which is the excellent band on the scale used, and hard coral at 6.7%, which is the poor band on the same scale. Only one other site in that eighteen site survey reached excellent for total cover, and it is soft coral dominated too. The same survey counted 31 fish species from 13 families on the transects here, second only to Lighthouse among the ten Malapascua sites it covers. In practice: a dense, colourful, soft reef with a lot living on it, and not the place to photograph staghorn.

Sometimes, and the claim arrives hedged: pygmy seahorses are here when conditions are right, which is not a promise. No account of this site identifies the species, and pygmies live on particular sea fans, so a guide either knows a fan here or does not. Treat one as a bonus. The frogfish, the cuttlefish and the nudibranchs are what this dive reliably delivers.

Between about five and fifteen minutes, and which end of that you get depends on where your shop sits, not on the sea. The dive shops are spread along the island's south side and the site is off the north west point, so a short hop for one boat is a quarter of an hour for another. It is one of the closest dives on the island's list, which is why it often lands as a second or third dive of the day.