Bohol Beach Club

This is a boat-accessed site, so the dive starts with a descent onto the reef rather than a swim out. What you land on is a gentle slope rather than a wall: hard and soft coral broken up by patches of open sand, with the reef falling away steadily to a maximum of about 30 metres. Conditions are generally calm, which matters here because the diving is slow and close to the bottom rather than a ride along the reef.

The dive is a macro search. Nudibranchs, moray eels and scorpionfish are the regular finds on the coral, and the list also runs to robust ghost pipefish and pygmy seahorses. All of them reward working a small stretch of reef properly instead of covering ground, so a dive here means picking a section of slope and letting a guide point out what is sitting still. Ordinary reef fish fill in the water above.

Because the deepest part of the site is the outer slope and the reef is a continuous gradient, the profile is easy to shape: drop to whatever depth the guide is working, then move gradually up the slope through the shallower coral and sand as the dive runs on. That keeps no-decompression time in hand and finishes the dive in shallow water over the same hard and soft coral.