Dauin · Philippines · Muck & macro · Reef
La Tortue House Reef
Muck and healthy reef on the sanctuary's southern edge
Area photo: Austin Rex Lobaton · CC BY-SA 4.0
A house reef at the southern end of the Dauin Poblacion District 1 Sanctuary, offering muck and a big, healthy reef in the same dive. Scubago rates it for beginners, advanced and expert divers alike, and the deepest part of the site is a mini reef at 30 metres that it flags for Advanced Divers. The rest of the dive sits shallow.
Where it is and how deep
9.1843° N, 123.2634° EPublished position for this site.
The dive
The site sits at the southern end of the Dauin Poblacion District 1 Sanctuary, and it is dived as two things at once. One half is muck, worked the way muck is worked everywhere on this coast: slowly, across the sand, with the guide picking out the animals you would otherwise swim straight past. The other is a big, healthy reef, which is not what a muck coast usually offers and is the reason the site is worth a tank on its own.
Scubago rates the site for beginners, advanced and expert divers, which is a fair description of how it scales. The muck and the reef both start shallow, so a newly certified diver can spend a whole tank on them without ever going deep. Divers with the certification for it add the mini reef at 30 metres, the one part of the site that is out of Open Water range, and then come back up to finish in the shallows.
Marine life and season
The sources we used don't single out particular species here.
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fair | Fair | Good | Prime | Prime | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good | Fair |
Season follows Dauin: Diveable year-round on the sheltered coast; December–February trade winds can raise chop on the shallow sand slopes.
Questions divers ask
How deep is La Tortue House Reef?+
The deepest part is a mini reef at 30 metres, which Scubago flags for Advanced Divers. The muck and the main reef both start shallow, so the rest of the dive sits well inside Open Water limits.
Sources
- La Tortue House Reef — Scubago
More dive sites in Dauin
Muck slope and coral bommies ten metres apart
Sand slope
Metal and concrete structures set on a seagrass flat
Coleman shrimp on fire urchins, and the coast's smallest finds
Artificial reef
Mimic, wonderpus and blue-ringed octopus under the pillars
A decade-old tyre reef, grown in and dived after dark too
Blue-ringed octopus and wonderpus on the rubble
Mandarinfish spawning over black sand in the last light
Muck & macro
A sunken jeepney and a Mustang on black sand
Similar dives elsewhere
Small wrecks, sea-pen sand and frogfish five minutes off the beach
Two jetties over a steep sand slope to 30 metres
Fine sand and rock past 30 metres, dived for the small stuff
Soft coral and macro on a rock in the cold south of the park