Rico's Wall

Half an hour southwest of Alona the boat stops off the island's west face, in front of the resort, and the reef top sits under the hull at three metres. The dive starts on that shelf, a coral garden running out to roughly eleven metres, with nudibranchs on the leathery corals and clownfish in the anemones. Then the ground stops. The edge drops into a near-vertical face carrying many large ledges.

Direction is the guide's call on the day's current. With the wall on your left shoulder going south the dive finishes toward Rudy's Rock; on the right shoulder going north it runs toward the Cathedral. Either way the face is the same. Small caverns, ledges and overhangs are cut into it, sea fans stand off the rock, and soft coral grows in clusters between them. Big groupers hold near the bottom of the wall between twenty and thirty metres, and they leave as soon as they see you.

The last third climbs back onto the reef top. Giant clams sit in the shallows, and the dive ends hanging over them inside the protected water, with fish around you and the clams underneath.

No other dive at Balicasag ends inside the no-take zone. The island's fish sanctuary covers 3.44 hectares of this west side and nothing may be taken from any of it1. The wall runs along that boundary, so the shallow end of the dive and the stop that closes it happen in protected water rather than beside it.

Then there is the pairing, which is rarer than it sounds. This is a serious wall and the operators still point divers up. It carries the lowest current rating of the island's five sites and runs as a relaxed dive across skill levels, while the stretch worth the tank sits at about ten metres. A wall you dive shallow, on the calmest water on the island.

And the unicornfish. Schooling bignose unicornfish are named at this site and at none of the island's other four. They hold above the drop in numbers, divers logged the same schools here two decades ago, and silver jacks circle alongside them in a column.

Frogfish are the recurring find on this face. Giant and warty frogfish sit in the clusters of soft coral with elephant-ear sponges around them, and guides work the wall slowly for exactly that. The gorgonians are the other half of it. The biggest sea fans here are described at more than two metres across, so the wall gives wide angle as much as macro.

Light is the third draw and it depends on the weather. On a sunny day the face throws reflected light through its fissures and holes, and the overhangs read as dark frames against it. That works best at the shallow end. The shelf above the drop carries nudibranchs, crinoids and anemonefish for close work, and the final minutes over the clams at five metres give a bright, calm background that most dives on this island finish without.

The number to hold on to is not the one on the slate. Published ranges for this site stop at thirty-five and forty metres, and forty is the figure to plan against; it marks a working floor and not the bottom. The face keeps dropping past recreational limits and nothing establishes where it ends, so the depth you dive here is a decision you make and not one the terrain makes for you.

There is little reason to chase it anyway. The best of the dive is shallow, and divers who have held to twenty or twenty-six metres here logged full dives without missing much.

Expect company at the finish. The reef top the dive ends on is snorkelling water too, so your last few minutes are spent at 3 to 5 metres under swimmers and the boats that brought them. Look up before you go up.

One more thing about the calendar. This face looks west into the southwest monsoon and the island has no lee that holds in both, so between June and October it is among the first sites to come off the day's plan when swell moves the fleet round to the northeast.