Lighthouse Reef

The dive

Lighthouse Reef is a shallow coral and rubble slope on sand off the northern side of Malapascua, five to fifteen minutes from the dive centres. Published depths run about 5 to 12 m. As a daytime dive it is unremarkable; the reason it is on every Malapascua schedule is that it is one of the most reliable places in the Philippines to watch mandarinfish spawn, which happens in the twenty minutes or so around sunset.

The dive is timed for that. Divers descend as the light goes and settle over the coral rubble waiting for the mandarinfish to emerge; a male and female rise together in a short spiral, release, and drop back into the coral. They are small, fast and skittish, and the sighting is not guaranteed. The rest of the site rewards the wait: tigertail seahorses on hard coral, banded and scribbled pipefish, juvenile sweetlips, bobtail squid, reef squid, cuttlefish, octopus, nudibranchs, shrimp, crabs, lionfish and banded sea snakes as the dive turns into a night dive. Blue-ringed octopus is occasionally reported.

This is not the thresher shark dive. Malapascua's threshers are at Monad Shoal, roughly thirty minutes away, and increasingly at Kimud Shoal, and both are pre-dawn deep-water dives with their own rules. Occurrence records drawn from a radius around Lighthouse pick up pelagic thresher from those shoals; that is an artefact of the search radius, not a species you should expect over this rubble slope. Do not book Lighthouse hoping for sharks.

What the occurrence records do support is the macro reputation: mandarinfish, tiger tail and thorny seahorses, pygmy seahorse, a long list of nudibranchs, anemone shrimp, porcelain crabs, striped eel catfish, snowflake moray, broadclub cuttlefish and harlequin sweetlips are all recorded in this stretch of reef.

• Mandarinfish spawning in the twenty minutes around sunset
• Tigertail seahorses, pipefish and juvenile sweetlips on the rubble
• Bobtail squid, cuttlefish and octopus once the light goes
• Shallow, close to shore, and beginner-friendly as dives go
• A dusk dive that rolls straight into a night dive

Conditions

Shallow coral and rubble on a sandy slope, 5 to 12 m, five to fifteen minutes by boat from the dive centres on the north side of Malapascua. The dive is timed to sunset, so you enter in fading light and finish in the dark. Water runs 26-29 C from March to December and 24-26 C in January and February. The dry season, January to June, gives calmer seas and 20-30 m visibility; July to December is rougher with occasional cancellations.

On current: No source publishes a current or visibility figure for Lighthouse specifically. Malapascua-wide figures are 20-30 m visibility in the January-June dry season and 15-30 m generally, but those are regional and the site is a shallow sandy rubble slope where silt matters more than water clarity - fin technique in the group ahead of you sets what you actually see. No ordinal is recorded for current.

Dives & underwater footage