Rudy's Rock

Off the southwest corner the reef top starts at about 3 metres and opens into a coral garden between 7 and 11: soft leathery and stony corals, with sea stars, anemonefish and nudibranchs working through them. At the edge of the field the ground stops. A wall drops away below the lip, sponges and crinoids on the face, small caverns and crevices cut into it, and gaps wide enough to swim through.

Large gorgonians and turtles begin at around 12 metres. Groupers sit back in the crevices. Off the lip, out in open water, bigeye trevally circle in the column that sells every site on this island, with midnight snapper and sweetlips along the wall underneath them.

You get one of two directions and you do not choose it. Wall on the left shoulder towards the exit point from Black Forest, or wall on the right shoulder towards Rico's Wall. The guide reads the current and picks. Either way the dive is worked shallow: one profile logged here averaged about 15 metres across a 53-minute dive, and the safety stop happens over the coral garden, not out in the blue.

Fewer boats come here than to anywhere else on the island, and that is the reason to want it. Operators call the site under visited, and a diver writing up a 2017 trip called it a favourite off the beaten path.

Nobody chooses it. Divers are assigned their Balicasag site, so preference never concentrates on one corner, and this corner is the exposed one. When swell pushes the day fleet onto the sheltered northeast pair, Rudy's Rock is the site that drops off the schedule while the famous ones absorb everybody.

The quiet has a price and the price is the water. Visibility here is the thinnest on the island, 12 to 20 metres where the neighbouring faces are given 15 to 30. What pays for it sits above 11 metres. The coral garden ranks with the island's best at that depth, and the reef top is shallow enough to snorkel over.

Each of the other four is the island's best at something, whether that is the black coral, the overhangs and the light, the seagrass turtles or the sanctuary shallows. Take this one when you would rather have the reef to yourself.

Divers were already using the name in 2005, when one planning a Bohol trip listed it among the stretches of coast his shop dived, and again in a 2009 itinerary. That puts it in continuous use for two decades, well before the island's list of five settled into the shape it holds now.

The namesake sits on land. A large rock marked with a stick shows above the beach at low tide, and the site takes its name from it. Nothing on the wall carries the name, and who Rudy was went unrecorded.

The wall has no floor you will reach. It keeps going below every depth anyone publishes for it, so your maximum here is a decision made on the boat and held on the gauge. Above it, the interest concentrates around 15 metres and thins out below 30.

The gaps in the wall are swim-throughs, not penetration, and nothing here asks for cavern training. Keep trim going through them and stay off the rock.

Season runs backwards on this corner. From about June to October the southwest monsoon leaves it open to the swell, and a rough day empties the schedule here while it fills the sheltered pair. October and November give the calmest shot at the quiet.

Balicasag has no dive infrastructure and no chamber is confirmed working on Bohol, so the plan for a bad day starts on the mainland and probably on Cebu: Gov. Celestino Gallares Memorial Medical Center in Tagbilaran on (038) 411-4868, and the coast guard at Barangay Tawala on 0927-350-5484. Dive insurance with hyperbaric cover is the baseline.