Kenting Diving: The Park’s Open Sites, the Operator Rule and an Outlet Without Its Reactors

Kenting National Park says visitors dive through an operator

The dive sites around Kenting lie in the waters of Kenting National Park, and the park, not the county, runs them. Taiwan’s Water Recreation Activities Management Regulations make that explicit: where an activity takes place inside a national park, the managing authority is the park itself, and it can only fine people once it has announced that the regulations apply.

Kenting has done that. Its rules page carries an announcement applying the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ regulations and, since 28 July 2026, a revised announcement titled “restricting the types, areas, times and conduct of water recreation in Kenting National Park”. That title copies the wording of article 36 of the Act for the Development of Tourism, which is where the park’s power to restrict comes from.

The recreation page updated the same day starts with a sentence most visitors never read. The park applies a cap on numbers to the listed sea activities, and “visitors shall do them through operators and may not do this kind of activity privately”. Snorkeling, day and night shore diving, freediving and boat diving are the first four items on that list.

Read it exactly as written. The sentence covers the whole list, and the list also contains swimming, so it reads like a statement of policy rather than a clause drafted for divers alone. The binding text is the 28 July announcement, which sits in a PDF this guide could not open. What is certain is the penalty behind any restriction the park announces.

Article 60 of the tourism act, in the current text as amended on 28 November 2025, fines anyone who ignores a management authority’s restrictions on type, area, time and conduct NT$10,000 to NT$50,000 and bans the activity. When the breach is commercial the fine rises to NT$50,000 to NT$200,000. An operator who skips the compulsory liability insurance faces NT$30,000 to NT$150,000.

Where Kenting diving is allowed: eight shore areas and 15 boat moorings

The park does not leave the map open. Daytime shore diving is permitted within 200 meters of shore at eight named areas: Wanlitong, Hongchaikeng, Hejie, Shanhai, the outlet (Chushuikou), the west side of the Houbihu harbor channel, Tiaoshi and Chuanfanshi (Sail Rock). Snorkeling has its own list of eleven areas, and daytime freediving is limited to seven: Wanlitong, Hejie, Hongchaikeng, Baisha, the outlet, Tiaoshi and Chuanfanshi.

Boat diving is a daytime activity inside a 100 meter radius of 15 named moorings. Among them are the Hejie wreck, the Houbihu soft coral area, the two outlet sites, Dulijiao, the Shuangfeng blue hole, the slope at Dalaogu and the fault at Xiaolaogu. The boat flies a dive flag and has to tie on to the anchored buoy already placed at the site. The park’s wording is that it “may not drop its own anchor”.

That mooring rule sits on top of a park-wide one. Item 13 of the list of prohibited acts in Kenting National Park, last amended by the Ministry of the Interior on 8 July 2025, bans anchoring on coral or coral reef anywhere in the park, dive boat or not.

Night shore diving is open at three areas only: the outlet, Wanlitong and the west side of the Houbihu channel, within 100 meters of shore. The night window closes at 10 pm. After that, an activity plan has to be submitted to the park first, and the park publishes a night-dive application form next to its rules. Our night diving guide covers the skills side.

One practical conflict is settled by the same page. Jet skis operate between 300 meters and 1 kilometer from shore, outside the 200 meter band where shore divers are, and article 13 of the national regulations forbids jet skis from sharing the same time and place as diving or swimming.

Taiwan’s rules for Kenting diving: a certificate, a local companion, eight divers per instructor

The national rulebook is short. The current text of the Water Recreation Activities Management Regulations, as amended on 16 April 2024, has a diving section of six articles. Article 16 defines diving as snorkeling, scuba and freediving. Article 17 says anyone who scuba dives or freedives shall hold a certificate for that activity issued by a domestic or foreign diving organization.

Article 18 is easy to misquote as a guide requirement. The text says something narrower: a scuba diver or freediver shall be accompanied by a person familiar with the dive area who meets article 17. That person needs a certification and local knowledge, not a guiding license. Every diver also has to set a dive flag in the area and carry a surface marker buoy, lift bag or freediving float.

Article 19 then binds whoever takes customers out. An instructor holding a domestic or foreign instructor rating may lead at most eight scuba divers, or four freedivers, rising to six with an assistant who is certified under article 17. A snorkel leader needs a training certificate and may take ten. The operator has to confirm each diver’s certification by a signed statement.

The briefing is also written into law. It must cover the time limit, the maximum depth, the direction of the current, the bottom structure, the danger areas and the conservation rules, and it should remind divers to consider their health. If a diver will not follow the briefing, the regulation says the dive stops.

Boats carry their own duties. Article 20 requires a boarding platform or ladder and a waterproof mobile phone with satellite positioning for the instructor. Under article 21 the skipper checks the radio before leaving, raises the dive flag when divers enter the water, and stays in the dive area until everyone is back. If a diver is overdue, the skipper calls for help and searches, and may not leave before support arrives.

Two details matter when booking. None of articles 16 to 21 contains an exception for a try dive or a course, so ask how the operator handles article 17 for an uncertified first dive. And article 10 sets the liability insurance an operator must carry: NT$3 million per person for bodily injury and NT$24 million per accident.

Five marine ecological protection areas in Kenting need the park’s permission to enter

The National Park Act divides a park into five kinds of zone. One of them, the ecological protection area, is the only kind that article 19 closes to entry: anyone going in needs the permission of the park headquarters. Kenting has five of them at sea, each a band running along the coast.

The park describes them one by one. The first runs west of Dapingding, from the Checheng–Hengchun boundary south to Wanlitong, 300 meters wide and 195.64 hectares. The second covers the water from the headland left of Baisha beach to the east side of Maobitou, 87.96 hectares, with a broad platform at about 10 meters dominated by soft corals.

The third stretches from Chuanfanshi to Shadao, 118.81 hectares, where the reef front ends between 15 and 25 meters. The fourth runs south of Fengchuisha past Longkeng to the west side of Eluanbi, 205.78 hectares. The fifth lies off the Houbihu intake, 106.78 hectares, and the park says it has high live coral cover and hosts research and coral restoration work.

Wanlitong is where the boundary bites. The park’s notice for it is titled, in translation, “Wanlitong marine ecological protection area: no entry without permission”. It says decades of recreation and harvesting sharply reduced marine life there, and that part of Wanlitong’s water became a protection area in the plan review of 2018.

A community patrol has watched it since 24 September 2023. The violations it reports most are entering without an application, catching animals and picking up coral rock, shells or sea sand. Signs mark the protection area at each entrance. Since Wanlitong is also one of the open shore-dive areas, ask the operator where the line runs before you walk in.

Catching, collecting, feeding and anchoring are banned across Kenting

Visitors often hear Kenting’s rules summed up as “don’t touch the coral”. The texts use different verbs, and they reach further. Article 13 of the National Park Act bans hunting animals and catching fish anywhere in any national park, along with polluting the water and any other act the park authority prohibits.

Kenting’s own list of prohibited acts adds the rest. Item 2 bans picking up, taking, selling or displaying shells, shell sand, coral reef rock and other rock specimens, unless you can prove they came from outside the park. Item 10 bans feeding wild animals, which covers the fish at a snorkel stop, and releasing or abandoning animals. Item 13 is the anchoring ban.

A diver who settles on the reef is not named in any of these items. A diver who breaks a piece off, carries it out or buys it is. Read together, the texts come down to three habits: take nothing out, feed nothing, and let the boat use the buoy.

Cooling water leaving the Maanshan plant in February 2012, years before the shutdown. Photo: rheins, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The Kenting outlet dive site and the reactors that stopped in May 2025

The outlet appears on the park’s lists for day shore dives, night dives, freediving and boat dives alike. It sits where the Maanshan nuclear power plant, on the west side of Nanwan Bay, released its cooling water. A 2014 study in PeerJ, citing earlier work, put the average water temperature there 2.0 to 3.0°C higher than at other reef sites in Kenting. A near-shore current and the tides trap the warm water and carry it south-west inside the bay.

The warm layer was shallow. The same study found the effluent confined to the water column above 3 meters, with no temperature effect below 7 meters. Corals at 3 meters were dominated by heat-tolerant Symbiodinium clade D, while corals at 7 meters, even at the outlet, carried clade C like the rest of Kenting.

The community changed with it. At 3 meters in 1986, Acropora made up 24.20 percent of total cover and Montipora 33.69 percent. By 2010 Acropora had fallen to 0.70 percent, Galaxea had risen to 21.20 percent, and Seriatopora and Stylophora were not detected at all.

The famous figure deserves a closer look. A 2026 paper in Scientific Reports repeats the 2 to 3°C in its introduction, then reports its own loggers, fixed beside coral colonies from February 2022 to October 2023, while the plant was still running. They averaged 27.82°C at the outlet and 27.44°C at Wanlitong, a difference of 0.42°C. What stood out was the swing: the daily range was larger at the outlet in most months.

All of that describes a running plant. Taiwan’s Nuclear Safety Commission records that Unit 1’s operating license expired on 27 July 2024, and Unit 2’s on 17 May 2025, when it was taken down that afternoon and entered decommissioning the next day, with its fuel moved to the spent fuel pool.

The story has not ended there. Taipower applied for a license renewal on 27 March 2026, and on 24 September 2026 the commission approved its restart plan. The commission stresses that this is one step: Taipower still has to carry out the plan, report the results and finish safety checks on aging, radiation and seismic risk.

So the outlet today is a reef shaped by decades of warm discharge, with the reactors off. No published temperature record from after the shutdown turned up for this guide, so treat any claim that the water there is still warmer with care.

Nanwan Bay in Kenting runs about 24°C in winter and 29°C in summer

The 2014 study gives the bay’s averages: sea surface temperature of 29.0°C in summer and 24.0°C in winter. The source of the water changes with the season, the Kuroshio Current in winter and a South China Sea current in summer. That five-degree gap is the difference to plan a wetsuit around.

Averages hide the part that surprises divers. At the outlet site, the same study reports daily swings of 8 to 10°C lasting about six hours, caused by upwelling from internal tides and waves generated in the Luzon Strait. Wanlitong, on the west coast, is the site researchers use as the stable comparison, because it has neither the discharge nor those abnormal fluctuations.

Summer peaks are real too. A survey of 11 Kenting sites from August 2015 to April 2017 logged a maximum of 31.2°C in August 2016, against an average summer maximum of 28.8°C for 2007 to 2016. Recreational divers reported local bleaching in shallow water that year, and the park relayed the reports.

A snooty wrasse over algae-covered reef in the soft coral area beside the Houbihu outlet, April 2022. Photo: Lu i-chi (呂一起), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Typhoons, not heat, left the clearest mark on Kenting reefs in 2015 to 2017

Seven typhoons passed during that 21-month survey, and five of them cooled the water. The authors concluded that the repeated storms lowered the thermal stress of the 2015 to 2016 El Niño and may have spared Kenting the worst of it. They also broke things. Turf algae dominated the surveyed reef throughout, averaging 38.3 percent, and macroalgae cover rose by 60 percent in a single year, from 11.4 percent in April 2016 to 18.3 percent in April 2017.

The same paper links the low cover of branching coral families, Acroporidae and Pocilloporidae, to earlier bleaching such as the 1998 mass event, and to the typhoons that arrive every year. Divers who expect table corals will find fewer here than the photos suggest. The park runs its own reef health checks with staff and volunteers at 13 sites, recording coral cover and indicator species.

Spawning gives the reef its other calendar. In Nanwan Bay the hammer coral Fimbriaphyllia ancora, growing at about 10 meters, spawns in late April or May. A 2024 study in Communications Biology followed 26 colonies there and found that about 70 percent changed sex every year after spawning, for at least three to four years running.

Kenting closes shore and boat diving at 1.5 meter waves

The wave rule is in the prohibited-acts list, item 15, and it is graded by activity. When waves stay at 1.5 meters or higher and red flags are set on the shore, snorkeling, shore diving and boat diving are banned, along with non-powered floats. Swimming stops at 1 meter, jet skis at 2 meters. When the park lies inside a typhoon warning area, the shore, the sea and the listed scenic spots close completely.

The park’s emergency page gives 119 as the first number and 112, then 9, when reception is poor. It lists three hospitals in Hengchun: Hengchun Christian Hospital (08-8892293), Hengchun Nanmen Hospital (08-8894568) and Hengchun Tourism Hospital (08-8892704). It names no recompression chamber, and this guide could not confirm one from a hospital’s own page, so ask your operator where a bent diver is taken before the first dive.

For reef damage or poaching, the park’s conservation hotline is 0800-885996 and the national park police are on 08-8861331. The dive insurance guide explains what a policy should cover for evacuation from a place like this.

Kenting dive centers listed by SSI and Green Fins: 14 businesses

The Kenting operator list holds 14 businesses, read on 21 September 2026. Thirteen are dive centers published by SSI in its register of affiliated centers. One is a Green Fins digital member, which means a self-evaluation and no assessment in person. Eight of the 14 publish a website.

SSI’s register lists freediving programs for seven of its 13 Kenting centers and extended range programs for three, which says what a center is rated for, not what runs this season. Most are filed under Pingtung County, the register’s town field, which is not always where a business operates.

None of this is a license. The park refers to the business plans it approves for water recreation operators, but its rules page does not post a list of them. Ask an operator for its approval and its insurance before you pay. Which registers can be read sets out what each source can and cannot tell you.