Exotic Dive Resort house reef

The dive

This is the house reef of Malapascua Exotic Island Dive Resort, the first dive shop on the island, at the eastern end of Bounty Beach on Malapascua's south side. The resort's own dive-site list puts it five minutes away by boat and describes a slope that starts at 5 m and eases down to about 13 m — the depth field on the same page reads 5 to 15 m — over scattered coral and patches of sea grass. It is the site the centre uses to shake divers down after time out of the water, with an Open Water minimum and no certification games.

What makes it worth a slot rather than just a check-out dive is that most of the structure is deliberate. Exotic describes coral-encrusted jeepneys, large concrete and wire frames and purpose-built swim-throughs scattered across the bottom, an artificial habitat that soft coral and small animals have colonised; Scuba Travel, which sells the resort, adds a few old boats to that list and dates the reef's Project AWARE Environmental Achievement Award to 2008. The resort calls the site its own protected area and recommends diving it twice, once in daylight and once at dusk or after dark.

The biology matches the ground. Occurrence records from this stretch of the island's south-east shore are dominated by seagrass and rubble animals rather than reef-wall species: sap-sucking sea slugs, three species of anemonefish with their porcelain crabs and anemone shrimp, striped eel catfish, chocolate-chip sea stars, sea hares, snowflake morays, box crabs, collector and hatpin urchins, wrasses of the sandy-bottom kind, and a long nudibranch list. Two cautions about that list, though: it is drawn from a radius wide enough to include the neighbouring reefs, and this pin sits inside 200 m of two other house-reef pins in our own catalogue. Evolution Diving, Thresher Shark Divers and Exotic each maintain a separate house reef off the south of Malapascua, and each describes a different dive — Thresher Shark Divers' is a 9 m artificial reef built since 2008 with old boats, a basketball hoop and a mock Stonehenge, and Evolution's is a muck dive three minutes from their beachfront. They are not the same site and should not be merged.

• Coral-encrusted jeepneys, concrete-and-wire frames and purpose-built swim-throughs sunk as an artificial reef
• 5 m to 13 m over scattered coral and seagrass — the resort's own refresher and check-out dive
• The site Exotic recommends diving twice, once in daylight and once at dusk or night
• Holder of a Project AWARE Environmental Achievement Award, dated to 2008 by Scuba Travel

Conditions

Water around Malapascua sits at roughly 26 to 29 °C most of the year, dropping to 24 to 26 °C in January and February; visibility across the island's sites runs 20 to 30 m in the dry months and commonly 10 to 15 m during the amihan, and no operator publishes a figure for this reef specifically. A normal dive is a slow shallow tour of the sunken structures and the seagrass between them, ending well inside no-decompression limits.

On current: No operator publishes a current figure for this site. Exotic uses it as the shake-down dive after time out of the water and recommends it for dusk and night dives, both of which imply benign conditions, but that is how the site is used rather than a measurement anyone took. Its own description gives two depths — 'starting at 5 meters and gently sloping to 13' in the prose, and 5 to 15 m in the summary field; we have used the deeper figure as the planning number.

Best months: Mar, Apr, May, Jun