Moalboal

Panagsama is a strip of dive shops and small resorts along a shoreline with almost no beach, and that shapes the day. Tanks go down concrete steps or a short jetty, divers fin out over the shallows, and the reef edge drops away a short swim from the entry. Because nothing has to be scheduled around a boat, most people take the house reef whenever it suits them, before breakfast, at dusk or after dark, and keep the outrigger trips for the morning.

Much of this coast is one long drop-off. It runs the length of Panagsama and on past Tongo Point, a coral-covered face broken by cracks and small overhangs, with a shallow shelf on top and blue water below it; at the points the profile eases into slopes of sand and rubble. Pescador sits apart from that pattern, a detached rock walled the whole way round with a chimney cut through it, so a dive there is a circuit rather than an out-and-back along the shore.

The sardines are not a fixed site. The school drifts along the reef edge, sitting off one set of steps one week and further along the shore the next, so guides check where it has settled before anyone gets in. The same body of fish then gets worked from three levels at once, by divers underneath it, freedivers dropping through it and snorkellers looking down from the surface, and the freediving schools that have opened along the strip trade on exactly that.

It suits divers early in their logbook, anyone taking a course, and photographers who want wide-angle and macro subjects on the same day without travelling between them. Costs are low and the walk-in access means a week here needs neither a big budget nor a fixed schedule. Divers after wrecks or reliable big-animal encounters will run out of material quickly; the appeal is one dependable, concentrated event with an easy reef around it.