The only place in the world with reliable year-round thresher shark encounters — a remote island at the tip of Cebu, reached by outrigger from Maya port
Malapascua is a small island (2.5km long, 1km wide) at the northern tip of Cebu island in the Philippines — accessible by banca (outrigger) boat from the Maya port (30-40 minutes, the last 12km of road from Daanbantayan being the least reliable stretch of pavement in Cebu). The island has one reason for global dive tourism: the Monad Shoal (a submerged plateau, 25-50m deep, 5 minutes by boat from Malapascua), where the nocturnal pelagic thresher shark (Alopias pelagicus) comes at dawn to be cleaned by the cleaner wrasse fish that inhabit the shoal. Thresher sharks (characterised by the enormo…
Malapascua ('bad Christmas' in Spanish, traditionally explained as the island's name having been given by Spanish sailors who arrived at Christmas and were caught in a typhoon) was a subsistence fishing community until the dive industry arrived in the late 1990s. The thresher shark encounters at Monad Shoal were first documented systematically by dive operators in the mid-1990s; the island's international dive reputation grew rapidly from there. Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan, November 2013 — the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone ever recorded) devastated Malapascua almost completely; the commu…