Dakit Dakit

Between about 5 and 15 metres, and the two operator charts that publish a figure do not agree. One gives 5 to 12 metres, another gives 15, and a third centre declines to put a number on it at all and calls it a shallow dive. No survey exists to settle it, so 15 is the figure to plan against because it is the deeper of the two and nothing on the site marks the difference for you. You will also meet 10 metres in print, which sits between the two published values and has nothing behind it.

No, and the difference is real and not a technicality. Dakit Dakit is a Snorkelling and No-Fishing Zone, one of five around Malapascua declared by Daanbantayan Municipal Ordinance 07-2010. The island's Marine Reserves are Gato Island, Monad Shoal and Lapus Lapus, and they run on a different ordinance dating from 2002. Both designations prohibit any kind of fishing or extraction of marine life, so what changes between them is the instrument and not what you are allowed to do. Dakit Dakit is the only one of the five zones with buoys marking where it runs, and those went in during February 2019, nine years after the ordinance passed. No permit, quota or fee attaches to diving it.

The one off Malapascua, in northern Cebu. At least three Philippine dive sites carry the name and two of them are far enough apart to book the wrong flight over. There is a Dakit-Dakit off Pamilacan Island in Bohol, roughly 200 kilometres south, which is a wall drift into 40 metres with turtles on it. There is another off Mactan Island near Cebu City. This page is the shallow islet cluster 1.2 kilometres off Bounty Beach on Malapascua, and nothing about the other two applies to it. If a booking or a boat plan just says Dakit Dakit, check which island you are leaving from.

Not on the dive. The blacktips people mean are in a small protected bay on the Malapascua shoreline in front of Tepanee Beach Resort, roughly 600 metres from the islets, where a coral rebuilding project has run since February 2020 and the fish have come back with it. That bay carries its own protected-area designation and its own name, which is close enough to this one to cause the confusion. It is a snorkelling area with beach access restrictions, not a boat dive, and its rules and its sharks stop at its own boundary.

It is the site the island uses for night dives, and the reasons are practical. The boat ride is five minutes, the profile is shallow enough that a long dive costs nothing in no-stop time, and the rock and sand hold the sort of animals that only come out after dark. Carry a torch and a backup, and stay tight to the group: the current does not stop for the dark, and the islets break the surface where the boat has to come and find you.

The centres that run it think so, and they publish it as recommended kit on a dive ten minutes from their own front door, which is not something operators do casually. Three things stack up here. The current between the islets can run strong. Rock breaks the surface, so boats work around and between the formations. And the profile is shallow enough that divers spread out over the site looking at small animals. A buoy deployed before the ascent solves all three.

Yes, and it is where most of them start on this island. Open Water is the published minimum, the whole dive sits inside those limits, and centres describe it as suiting all levels, and as the dive for anyone who wants to shake off a long break before the shark boat. The honest caveat is the current, which is what makes this site harder some days than the depth suggests. A diver who is comfortable in moving water will find it easy. One who is not should ask what the water is doing that morning, and take the answer seriously.