The Pioneers of Diving on Malapascua
Thresher Shark Divers is located on Malapascua Island in the central Philippines, near the western end of a picture-perfect white sand beach that is fringed with palm trees and aqua-blue waters. But it’s what’s in those waters that attracts most visitors!
Throughout the years, our mission has remained to offer a professional, safe, and fun dive experience to all our customers.
Our international team is ready to welcome divers from all over the world!
About Malapascua Diving
Malapascua is famous as the only place in the world where thresher sharks can reliably be seen every day. They come to a sea mound, Monad Shoal, every morning to visit its cleaning stations.
But Malapascua’s diving has much more to offer, with easily a week or more of varied dives. Dive sites span the range: reefs and wrecks, wall dives and muck dives, colourful coral gardens, mating mandarin fish, frogfish, seahorses, nudibranchs galore, and amazing macro and critters. There is an exciting tunnel under Gato Island that has resident whitetip sharks, and other large sharks and rays are possible. Basically, there is something for everyone from easy beginner to very advanced tec dives, from nudi-fanatics to metal-heads.
Thresher Sharks
Thresher sharks come year-round to Monad Shoal in the early morning to visit the cleaning stations.
We get great sightings at TSD, they just keep improving, and we believe it is the best shark experience on the island because:
- Most shops go to one of two very small cleaning stations where the divers kneel behind a rope waiting. There are usually 4-8 boats at each spot so you will see a lot of other divers and there is not much to see if you do not see a shark except other divers.
- TSD dives a different area, where there are many cleaning stations, and it’s rarely busy. We have spectacular, often close-up sightings almost every day. Sightings are infinitely better than they were in our early days at the “kneeling” spot. And it’s a “swimming” dive with the chance to see many other creatures like frogfish, seahorses and ghost pipefish as well as other pelagics like rays and other sharks.
Fun diving with TSD
We have a team of very experienced PADI Divemasters, most of whom have worked for us for over 10 years with 5,000+ dives around the island. They have laser eyes to find all that hidden macro and are well drilled in safety protocols, so you will have a smooth, professional and hopefully mind-blowing dive from start to finish 🙂
We like to keep things small so that your dive experience is as personalized as possible. You won’t be just one insignificant diver among many and we keep groups as small as we can. In addition, we try to be flexible and will do our best to accommodate requested dive sites.
Courses
We are a PADI 5-Star CDC Dive Center, the highest level of PADI dive centre, and the only one on Malapascua. We teach a full range of courses including PADI Instructor and technical.
Our multilingual Instructor team is highly experienced, with most of them being PADI Master Instructors. Courses are generally taught individually with a maximum of four, usually with a trainee assisting.
PADI Open Water Diver Course
Learn to dive in the warm clear waters around Malapascua! And after certification, you can dive with our famous thresher sharks!
PADI Advanced Open Water Course
Continue your adventure! During the AOW course you will explore and develop five specialized diving activities. You will amazed at the skill improvement you will have acquired by the end of this course on Malapascua. Includes a Deep Dive on the thresher shark site, Navigation, and choose from Buoyancy, Photography, Wreck, Night, Naturalist and more.
PADI Nitrox Course
Nitrox has become standard in many places, and if you intend to dive fairly often, we highly recommend becoming nitrox certified. You can stay down longer and reduce your nitrogen load. You often feel less tired as well! Malapascua has several dive sites perfect for Nitrox.
More PADI Courses
We offer a full range of PADI courses including Specialties, Tec, Divemaster and Instructor IDC.
Dive sites:
We have over 20 defined dive sites, some with several separate dives, and all are very different during night dives. Some of the highlights:
Gato Island: “You come for the sharks, but you leave remembering Gato” is the phrase we penned back in 2003, and it is still true today. Gato has a huge variety of life, but is possibly most well known for its close-up encounters with large whitetip reef sharks, its banded sea snakes, and a swim-through tunnel that goes right under the island!
Dona Marilyn Wreck: The best wreck in the central Philippines, it is a passenger ferry that sank 40 years ago, 100m long laying between 18 and 32 meters.
Lighthouse: See the psychedelic dance of the mating mandarinfish
Kalanggaman Island: Stunning wall dives and the surface interval on this Insta-fantastic island, once named the “best island in the Philippines”
Resorts
We work with a wide range of resorts on Malapascua and can help you find something to fit your needs.
Getting to Malapascua
Malapascua is located in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines. It is served by Cebu Mactan International Airport (CEB).
Several airlines fly directly to Cebu, including Singapore, Emirates, Qatar, Korean and Turkish, and more to Manila, which is an easy 75-minute internal flight. More airlines and schedules are being added regularly post-pandemic.
We can arrange pickup from the airport with a private car or van (3 hours), and a private boat will be waiting in Maya port to bring you to the island (30 minutes). Expect to arrive 5-6 hours after your flight landing time.
Seasons:
We have good diving year round. We lose very few diving days each year to the weather. The weather is best from January to May, the high season.
June to December is the “Rainy” season or low season, but we do not have monsoon, it’s usually just a small amount of rain some evenings.
Occasional typhoons come through but they usually pass to the north. If they do come close we’re usually only affected 1-2 days.
June to September usually had great weather and all low season months have the advantage of fewer toursits, and less divers in the water.\
