Coverage / Bahamas
Bahamas
Caribbean
An archipelago of some 700 islands and cays spread across the clear shallow banks between Florida and the Caribbean, the Bahamas is one of the great diving and boating nations of the world. Its waters hold the tiger sharks of Tiger Beach, the great hammerheads of Bimini, the third-largest barrier reef and the blue holes of Andros, and Dean's Blue Hole on Long Island, one of the deepest in the world. Nassau on New Providence is the capital and gateway, Junkanoo fills Bay Street at Christmas and New Year, and the Family Island regattas keep Bahamian working sloops racing each spring.
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What you can do in Bahamas
Scuba Diving
- Alice TownJan Feb Mar Apr Nov DecBimini is where you dive with great hammerheads. From late autumn to spring, huge great hammerhead sharks, some over four metres long, gather in the shallows off North Bimini, and dive boats out of Alice Town put divers on the sand in about six metres of water to watch them sweep past at arm's length. It is one of the rarest big-shark encounters on the planet and among the most dependable, run in bright, shallow water rather than the deep blue. Bimini backs the hammerheads with a full season of diving: Caribbean reef and nurse sharks, stingray dives, the sunken hull of the SS Sapona standing out of the water since a 1920s hurricane, and wild Atlantic spotted dolphins that ride the boats' bow wake on the bank. The island sits right on the edge of the Gulf Stream a short hop from Florida, which is how it became a sportfishing and diving legend, and why the shark diving here is both world-class and easy to reach.
- Andros TownMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug SepAndros is the great wild diving frontier of the Bahamas. Along its eastern shore runs the Andros Barrier Reef, at 124 miles the third-largest barrier reef in the world, and just beyond it the seabed falls away into the Tongue of the Ocean, a two-kilometre-deep trench, so a single boat ride can take you from shallow coral gardens to the lip of a vast blue drop-off. Andros is also the blue-hole capital of the country, riddled with flooded limestone caves both inland and offshore, and diving them is unlike anything on the reef. All of this sits off the biggest, emptiest island in the Bahamas, where the diving is uncrowded and the reef is healthy. The island's dive tradition runs deep: the lodge that opened here in 1960 was one of the first all-inclusive dive resorts in the Caribbean, and it still runs boats to more than sixty sites along the wall and into the blue holes, between bonefishing flats and mangrove creeks.
- Tiger BeachJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecTiger Beach is the world's most reliable place to meet a tiger shark face to face. On a bright sand flat in six to nine metres of water off the West End of Grand Bahama, divers kneel on the bottom while big female tiger sharks cruise past close enough to touch, joined by packs of lemon sharks and by Caribbean reef and nurse sharks. There is no cage. The whole encounter happens in shallow, sunlit water, which is why the site has drawn shark photographers and film crews from around the world and why the tiger shark became a Bahamian conservation emblem after the country banned longline fishing and later shark fishing outright. The action peaks in the cooler months, roughly October to January, when tiger numbers are highest, and the same boats can run to Bimini for great hammerheads or out to Cat Island for oceanic whitetips as the seasons turn. It is a bucket-list dive, and it exists because these waters have been protected.
Best months at a glance
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