Scuba Diving in January

In September 1944, US carrier planes caught a Japanese supply fleet at anchor in Coron Bay and put a dozen ships on the bottom, where they still lie, coral-crusted, intact, and mostly within recreational depth. That accident of history makes Coron the rare wreck destination where ordinary certified divers penetrate real engine rooms and cargo holds, seaplane tenders, freighters, a gunboat, without technical training, and where an Advanced course pays for itself in a single trip. Between wreck days, the karst lagoons of Coron Island, including the thermally layered Barracuda Lake, offer diving found nowhere else.

Year-round Red Sea diving from shore at budget prices, with the famous Blue Hole and a dedicated learning community that makes Dahab one of the world's top divemaster training destinations. Immediate deep-water access without a boat separates it from every other dive town on the Red Sea.

More people get their first scuba certification on Koh Tao than on any other island on the planet, and the reason is simple: the water is warm, shallow, and forgiving, dozens of dive sites sit within a short boat ride, and a decade of competition between schools has driven course prices to some of the lowest in the world without dropping teaching quality. The island runs almost entirely on diving, so instructors are plentiful, dive boats leave constantly, and the whole town is set up around getting people in the water quickly and safely. It is also a legitimate spot to keep progressing: whale sharks pass through in season, and there is enough variety in reef and wreck diving to hold an intermediate diver's interest well past their Open Water card.

Thresher sharks, with their impossibly long scythe tails, live in deep water and almost never meet divers anywhere on earth. Malapascua is the exception: every morning the sharks rise onto a shallow seamount to visit cleaning stations, and boats leaving before dawn put divers on them at close range, often several sharks in a single dive, day after day, year-round. Since 2022 the action has centered on Kimud Shoal after the sharks shifted from the long-famous Monad Shoal, and the island's dive operations adjusted with them. No other destination offers a guaranteed daily appointment with a deep-water shark, and the island around it is the classic small dive island: sandy lanes, dive shops, and not much else you need.

Dive Bahrain is the draw here, an underwater theme park off the north coast built around a decommissioned Boeing 747, at the time the largest aircraft ever deliberately sunk for divers. The jet sits upright in around 20 meters of warm, sheltered water, wings and fuselage intact, alongside a submerged replica of a traditional pearl merchant's house and sculpted reef structures designed to grow coral. Because it is shallow and calm, the site suits newly certified divers and works as a striking wreck for more experienced ones, and the surrounding Gulf reefs hold rays, barracuda, angelfish and the occasional turtle. The boats run from the Amwaj marinas on Bahrain's north-east tip, a short hop out to the site, so a morning trip fits easily around a city stay. It is one of the few places in the world where you can swim the length of a jumbo jet's cabin.

Bequia is the diving hub of the Grenadines, a small island with a deep seafaring history and a coastline of reefs, walls and drift dives all within a short boat run of Port Elizabeth. The sheltered west side has easy reef and wall dives that suit newer divers and courses, while the channels and points pick up current and bring bigger fish, turtles, rays, nurse sharks and the occasional reef shark. Because the island sits mid-chain, dive boats can also run to sites around the neighboring islets and reefs on calm days. Two long-standing dive shops work the harbor, both walkable from the ferry and the Belmont waterfront, so you can dive, certify or just snorkel between other Grenadines plans. For a Caribbean reef base that is unhurried, characterful and thoroughly local, Bequia is the one.

Self-reliant divers' paradise. Rent a truck, load tanks, drive to any of 86 marked sites around the island, and enter from shore, no boat, no schedule, no guide required. The marine park is among the most strictly enforced in the Caribbean, which means coral health far exceeds comparable destinations. Divers routinely do 3-4 dives a day at their own pace.

Carlisle Bay packs the best easy diving in Barbados into one calm, shallow marine park on the edge of Bridgetown. Six shipwrecks lie in the sand less than 200 meters from the beach, from the Berwyn, a 1919 tugboat now furred with coral, to the Bajan Queen, a former harbor cruise vessel sunk in 2002, all sitting between about 5 and 18 meters and reachable on a single dive. The wrecks act as artificial reefs, thick with sergeant majors, moray eels, seahorses, frogfish and the occasional octopus, and green and hawksbill turtles cruise through on their way to the seagrass beds. Because everything is shallow and protected from swell, this is an ideal place to learn to dive or to log a relaxed wreck-and-turtle dive with high visibility. Beyond the bay, the west-coast reefs and deeper wrecks like the freighter Stavronikita give certified divers more to explore.

Off Cockburn Town the sea floor sits shallow and sandy, then falls off a cliff. The Grand Turk wall runs the length of the island's west coast just a few hundred meters out, its lip starting around ten meters and dropping past two thousand, so a two-minute boat ride puts you on a vertical face of coral, sponges and gorgonians with the open Columbus Passage yawning below. More than forty named sites line the wall, most of them a short hop from the dock, with mooring buoys protecting the reef. Turtles, groupers, reef sharks and eagle rays patrol the drop-off, and from January to April migrating humpback whales pass through the deep channel, sometimes heard on the dive. Grand Turk is a quieter, more low-key base than Provo, cheaper and slower, with the wall so close that surface intervals are spent back at the dock. For divers who want world-class wall diving without a long run offshore, this is one of the best-value walls in the Caribbean.

The drift diving benchmark. Crystal Caribbean water at 30-60m visibility, warm temperatures year-round, and effortless drift along Palancar Reef and Santa Rosa Wall make Cozumel the most reliable introduction to drift technique and the easiest way to experience world-class Caribbean reef structure.

The Daymaniyat Islands are the best diving within easy reach of Muscat, a protected marine reserve of nine low islands ringed by healthy hard and soft coral. Forty minutes offshore by boat, the sites range from gentle coral slopes ideal for a first open-water dive to livelier drop-offs and swim-throughs, and the reserve status keeps the fish life dense: green and hawksbill turtles, honeycomb morays, stingrays and eagle rays, reef sharks, and huge schools of snapper and fusilier. From roughly July to September plankton draws whale sharks, the highlight of the Omani diving year, and the shallows make the same islands a first-class snorkelling trip for non-divers. Because it is a nature reserve the islands themselves are closed to landing during the seabird and turtle nesting season, so the experience is all in the water. Warm, clear and close to the city, it is the reason Muscat has a cluster of long-running dive centers.

The east coast is where the UAE finally has an ocean rather than the shallow, warm Gulf. From Dibba down to Al Aqah and Khorfakkan the Hajar mountains meet the Gulf of Oman, and a string of dive sites sits within a short boat ride of shore. Dibba Rock is the signature site, a horseshoe reef that gathers turtles, reef sharks, honeycomb morays and vast schools of jacks. Snoopy Island and the sunken Inchcape wrecks add easy shore and boat dives. Divers Down, based at Al Aqah since 2001, is the region's most established center and a PADI five-star operation; Freestyle Divers at Dibba runs PADI, RAID and technical courses and reaches the same reefs. Both are a straightforward day trip from Dubai.

Eilat is the easiest world-class coral diving on the planet to reach, a reef you can walk into from the shore at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba. The Coral Beach Nature Reserve protects a fringing reef alive with more than 1,200 species of fish and around 250 species of coral, a few fin-kicks from the beach, while offshore the wreck of the Satil missile boat and the Japanese Gardens reef reward boat dives. The water is warm and clear the year round, sheltered from ocean swell inside the gulf, so conditions stay calm and visibility often runs past 20 meters even in winter. This is a superb place to learn: the shallow, protected house reefs let a first course happen in real coral rather than a pool, and the town's dive centers run the full ladder from a first try-dive to instructor training. Turtles, moray eels, lionfish and the occasional reef shark patrol the drop-offs, and night dives bring out Spanish dancers and hunting octopus.

Flic en Flac is the diving capital of Mauritius, and its signature dive, the Cathedral, is one of the most photographed sites in the Indian Ocean. A short boat ride off this west-coast town, the reef drops into a cavern of arches, chimneys and grottoes where sunlight pours through the roof in shafts, and lobster, moray and lionfish shelter in the shadows. The whole leeward coast here sits in the lee of the trade winds, so the water is calm and the visibility long, and the sites stack up within minutes of the beach: the wall at La Cathedrale, Snake Reef, Rempart Serpent with its scorpionfish and stonefish, and the deliberately sunk wrecks off the coast that now grow coral and shoal with fish. It suits a first open-water course in the sheltered lagoon just as well as an experienced diver chasing the deeper cavern and the drop-offs, and from roughly November to April the offshore water carries the chance of passing dolphins and, in the right season, humpback whales.

The Andamans are the diving India most people never realize India has: twenty-plus dive sites off Havelock alone, 15-30 meter visibility in season, healthy reef, and a fraction of the boat traffic of comparable Southeast Asian islands. The island hosts India's longest-established dive operations, with both PADI and SSI training up to professional level, so it works equally as a place to earn a first certification and as a serious destination diver's stop. The remoteness that keeps crowds down is the point: this is reef diving at Thailand-level cost with Indian Ocean emptiness, on an island where diving is still the main event rather than one activity on a resort menu.

Jeddah sits on one of the least-dived stretches of the Red Sea, and that is exactly the draw. Just off the Obhur creek north of the city lie more than thirty sites, a mix of fringing reef, steep walls and wrecks, most of them reached on a short boat hop rather than a long crossing. Beginners start on the Cable Wreck, a hull that went down in 1978 and now rests upright at around 24 meters, while the larger Ann Ann drops toward 32 meters for more experienced divers. The corals are dense and the fish life is intact in a way that heavily trafficked Egyptian sites no longer are, because Saudi tourism only opened in 2019. From here liveaboards also run south to the remote Farasan Banks, some of the least-explored reefs in the sea.

Jolly Harbour is the practical home of diving in Antigua. Sitting on the leeward west coast, it is shielded from the trade winds that stir the Atlantic side, so the water is usually calm and clear and the boat rides to the sites are short. The signature reef is Cades Reef, a long protected ribbon off the south-west coast with coral heads, sponges, parrotfish, barracuda, turtles and the occasional eagle ray in easy 12 to 18 meter depths. For structure there is the Andes, a three-masted British merchant barque that caught fire and sank in Deep Bay in 1905 and now sits upright in shallow water as an artificial reef you can circle on a single tank, plus the dramatic Pillars of Hercules rock formation at the harbor mouth. The conditions are forgiving enough to learn in and varied enough to keep certified divers interested, and the two long-running PADI centers at Jolly Harbour run the full ladder of courses as well as daily two-tank guided dives. This is warm, low-stress Caribbean diving with reef and wreck within the same morning.

The Similans are among the world's top liveaboard destinations for a structural reason: the marine parks close entirely from mid-May to mid-October, giving the reefs a five-month rest every year, and the season that remains delivers 15-to-50-meter visibility with Richelieu Rock, Thailand's most famous single site, producing whale sharks and mantas in the February-to-April window. Khao Lak exists substantially to serve this: a dedicated liveaboard fleet runs four-day, four-night itineraries from Thap Lamu pier, staffed by PADI five-star operations. This is the expedition counterpart to Koh Tao's learn-to-dive scene, a different product on a different sea.

Cambodia's diving is the quiet corner of the Gulf of Thailand, and Koh Rong and Koh Rong Sanloem are where it is centerd. This is warm, forgiving water with good visibility and little current on the inshore reefs, which makes it an easy, affordable place to learn or to log relaxed fun dives among hard and soft coral, nudibranchs, seahorses and reef fish. The country's dive scene is small and long-established rather than industrial, so courses run in tiny groups. For experienced divers the pull is the remote outer islands, Koh Tang, Koh Prins and Condor Reef, a two to three-hour boat run or overnight trip to reefs, pinnacles and wrecks that see very few divers. It is a genuine off-the-map dive destination within Southeast Asia.

Malmok is where Aruba's marquee dive sits, and it is one of the most accessible great wreck dives anywhere. The Antilla was a brand-new 121-meter German cargo ship in 1940 when her captain scuttled her off Malmok rather than surrender her to the Dutch after the invasion of the Netherlands, and she has rested on her port side in 18 meters of clear water ever since. Because she is so large and so shallow, with parts breaking the surface, snorkellers drift over the same wreck that divers swim through, past cavernous holds now grown over in coral and sponge and busy with fish, one of the reasons she is nicknamed the Ghost Ship. The leeward north-west coast that shelters her also gives Malmok itself calm, shallow, clear water that is ideal for a first Discover Scuba session, confined-water training or freediving, while certified divers add the reefs and a scatter of other wrecks along the coast. Warm water year round, little current on the lee side and a wreck this big and this shallow make Malmok a rare site that works for a complete beginner and a seasoned diver on the same boat.

Maria la Gorda is Cuba's most accessible world-class wall diving. The reef drops away close to shore in the sheltered Bay of Corrientes, so most of the fifty-odd sites are a five to fifteen minute boat ride out. Divers come for the Valle de Coral Negro, a hundred-meter wall of black coral, and the Salon de Maria cavern, plus big stands of gorgonians, schooling snapper and tarpon, turtles and the odd whale shark on the drop-offs. It sits inside the Guanahacabibes reserve at the empty western end of the island, so topside is birdlife and beach rather than resort strip.

Molinere Bay is where two of the Caribbean's signature dives sit almost side by side. The Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park was created here in 2006 by Jason deCaires Taylor, the first of its kind in the world, sunk to help reefs recover after Hurricane Ivan tore through Grenada in 2004. Sixty-odd concrete figures rest between five and eight meters down, from the ring of children holding hands known as Vicissitudes to a man at a desk, now furred with coral and circled by fish, shallow enough that snorkellers see them too. A short boat ride away lies the Bianca C, a 180-meter Italian cruise liner that caught fire and sank in 1961, the largest shipwreck in the Caribbean and nicknamed the Titanic of the Caribbean. She sits in 30 to 50 meters for advanced divers, patrolled by eagle rays and barracuda. Grenada counts more than fifteen wrecks in all and calls itself the shipwreck capital of the Caribbean, with warm, clear water and reefs that see far fewer divers than the busier islands to the north.

The Musha and Maskali islands sit just off Djibouti City inside a protected marine park, and they are the easy, year-round face of Red Sea diving in the Gulf of Tadjoura. Shallow coral gardens ring the islands in warm, clear water, with reef fish, rays, turtles and the occasional reef shark, and the short boat ride means you can dive in the morning and be back in town for lunch. This is where Djibouti's dive centers run their certification courses and check-out dives, so it suits first-timers and anyone after easy reef time. For stronger currents and bigger fish, the same operators push further out to the tide-swept narrows of Le Goubet and, in season, the remote Seven Brothers archipelago near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait.

Musandam is Oman's diving jewel, a mountainous peninsula of fjord-like inlets, the khors, cutting into the Strait of Hormuz where the Gulf of Oman meets the Arabian Gulf. Strong tidal currents funnel nutrient-rich water past sheer rock walls and pinnacles, and the result is some of the most fish-heavy diving in the region: schooling jacks and barracuda, rays, reef sharks, turtles, and in the cooler months plankton blooms that draw whale sharks. Sites like Lima Rock, the Caves and Ras Sarkan drop straight off the cliffs, and most diving is run from a fast boat or a traditional wooden dhow out of Khasab in the north or Dibba in the south, so a dive day doubles as a cruise through the Norway of Arabia. Visibility swings with the currents and season, which keeps it interesting, and the same trip can mix drift walls for experienced divers with sheltered coral gardens for beginners. It is a wilder, less-polished counterpoint to the resort diving across the water in the Emirates.

Negril is the easiest and most reliable diving in Jamaica. Sitting on the sheltered western tip of the island, it is largely shielded from the trade winds and swell that stir up the north coast, so the water is usually calm and clear with the kind of visibility that makes for relaxed, forgiving dives. The reefs sit close in, most sites lying between about 9 and 27 meters, with coral gardens, sponges and reef fish over sites known as The Throne Room, Sharks Reef, Fantasy Reef and Treasure Reef, plus a scatter of shallow wrecks and swim-through caverns and arches for a bit of structure. The gentle conditions make Negril a fine place to learn: several small owner-run PADI shops on Norman Manley Boulevard run the full ladder of courses from a first try-dive to Divemaster, and the short boat rides mean you spend your time underwater rather than getting there. It is warm-water, low-stress Caribbean diving with a sunset on the cliffs to finish the day.

Providencia sits inside the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve behind 32 kilometers of barrier reef, and its distance from everything, two flights from mainland Colombia, no cruise ships, a few thousand residents, keeps the reef healthy and the dive sites empty. Visibility routinely runs past 25 meters over walls, coral gardens, and a scattering of wrecks, with reef sharks and rays as regulars. The island's handful of dive operations know sites no chart names, and diving here still feels like being let in on something, which almost nowhere in the Caribbean can honestly claim.

Under this coast run Sac Actun and Ox Bel Ha, the two longest underwater cave systems on earth, and above them sits the global capital of overhead-environment diving: the place technical divers fly to for the training ladder from guided cavern dives through TDI full cave and rebreather, in the schools where much of modern sidemount technique was developed. The diving itself is unrepeatable, gin-clear fresh water, haloclines, the light beams of Dos Ojos, The Pit's depth, Angelita's hydrogen-sulfide river, and it runs at a constant 24 to 25 degrees regardless of what the ocean or the weather is doing. An Open Water card and a guide get you into the cavern zone; the caves themselves demand the courses, which is why people come.

Santa Catalina is the jumping-off point for Coiba, the marine national park that is Panama's answer to the Galapagos. Coiba National Park protects 38 islands and the largest coral reef in the tropical eastern Pacific, and it sits on the migratory corridor that links the Galapagos, Cocos and Malpelo, so the diving is about big animals in blue water rather than reef macro. Whitetip and blacktip reef sharks patrol the cleaning stations, huge schools of jacks and snapper ball up in the current, and from around December into April whale sharks and hammerheads move through. The signature site, Granito de Oro, is a tiny islet with a reef that suits newer divers, while sites like Wahoo and Bajo Solitario off the outer islands are current-swept and better for the experienced. The park was a penal colony until 2004, which is why its reefs were never fished out, and the 60 to 90 minute boat ride from Santa Catalina keeps daily numbers low. This is the best diving in Panama and one of the best in Central America.

Sao Tome is one of the last uncrowded dive destinations in the Atlantic, an equatorial island where you can have a reef to yourself. The water is warm all year and the volcanic coast drops straight into it, so dives run from shallow coral gardens to black-rock walls and pinnacles a short boat ride from the beach. The marine life is the draw: big schools of barracuda and jack, groupers, rays, moray eels, and the reef fish of the Gulf of Guinea, with green and hawksbill turtles common and the chance of dolphins on the surface run. Between roughly July and October humpback whales pass close inshore and are sometimes heard underwater. There is almost no dive traffic, so the sites are unspoilt and the operator can tailor the day to the conditions. For a diver who has ticked off the busy tropics, the appeal here is space, warm blue water and a coast almost nobody dives.

Egypt's most developed resort dive hub, with well-organized operations and easy liveaboard access to the SS Thistlegorm, the world's most dived wreck. Ras Mohammed National Park is 20 minutes by boat and delivers consistent shark, turtle, and reef encounters.

Soufriere holds the best diving in Saint Lucia, on the volcanic drop-offs that plunge straight down from the base of the Pitons. The whole coast here sits inside the Soufriere Marine Management Area, set up in 1995 to end anchor damage and overfishing, so the reefs are dense with coral and reef fish and the shallow zones have recovered into some of the healthiest in the country. The signature site is Superman's Flight, a sheer wall beneath Petit Piton that runs from the surface past 40 meters with the current pushing you along it, named for the scene filmed here. Anse Chastanet is a classic shore dive with a reef starting a few meters off the beach and the wrecked Lesleen M sitting upright in the sand nearby, a deliberate artificial reef now covered in sponges and home to turtles and moray eels. Water is warm and clear year round, sites range from beginner reefs to advanced walls, and the drama of diving in the shadow of a UNESCO peak is hard to match in the Caribbean.

Dominica's best diving is packed into the Soufriere Scotts Head Marine Reserve, a flooded volcanic crater at the southern tip of the island where the sea floor drops away in walls, pinnacles and canyons. The reserve was set up in 1998 to end anchor damage and overfishing, and the reefs have recovered into some of the healthiest in the eastern Caribbean, thick with barrel sponges, sea fans, frogfish, seahorses and turtles. The signature dive is Scotts Head Pinnacle, an underwater ridge riddled with swim-throughs where two bodies of water meet, alongside the sheer wall of L'Abym that runs past 40 meters and the crater rim of Scotts Head Drop-Off. Just north lies the island's most famous site, Champagne Reef, where geothermal vents send streams of warm bubbles up through the shallows so you dive and snorkel through what feels like a glass of champagne. The water is warm and clear, the sites sit minutes from shore in the calm western lee, and the volcanic drama underfoot is what sets Dominica apart from the rest of the region.

Speyside is the best diving in Trinidad and Tobago and among the best in the southern Caribbean, and the reason is water. Currents carrying nutrients from the Orinoco and the Guyana Basin wash the reefs off this northeast corner of Tobago, feeding an unusually dense coral community and the filter feeders that follow it. The signature dive is Kelleston Drain, home to a brain coral more than three meters across, the largest recorded in the Caribbean, while Japanese Gardens off Goat Island is a shallow, sunlit sprawl of soft and hard coral. The same currents make this drift-diving country, where you fly along walls and pinnacles like The Sisters, and they bring in the big animals: manta rays cruise the sites off Little Tobago through the spring and summer, alongside reef sharks, turtles and shoaling fish. Dive sites sit five to fifteen minutes from shore, so days are relaxed, and because Speyside is far from the resort strip the reefs stay quiet.

Zanzibar pairs a real dive destination with a place worth being between dives, which is rarer than it sounds: the Mnemba Atoll conservation area holds the archipelago's richest reef, turtles, dolphins, and walls of tropical fish over shallow coral gardens, while closer sites off Stone Town mix coral, macro life, and wrecks from the island's trading centuries. Surface intervals happen against a skyline of minarets and dhow sails, and the diving day ends in the lanes of a UNESCO World Heritage city rather than a resort strip. Warm water, easy conditions, and PADI training up the ladder make it as good for a first certification as for a travel-diver's week.

The world's most reliably documented whale shark aggregation, with the Indian Ocean's highest density of resident manta rays. Small backpacker-diver community in a town that still feels genuinely off the beaten path, with dive operators who know these animals individually and run research-alongside-recreation programs.

Watamu Marine National Park, gazetted in 1968, is one of Africa's oldest marine protected areas and part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and its reward structure suits divers of every level: around fifteen named reef sites sit ten to twenty-five minutes from shore, coral gardens hold resident green turtles, and the November-to-February window brings whale sharks and mantas up the coast. Aqua Ventures has taught PADI courses from Ocean Sports Resort since 1989, which makes it one of East Africa's longest-standing dive schools, and the protected status shows underwater in fish density the open coast cannot match.

Curacao is one of the great diving islands of the Caribbean, and the sheltered coast around Willemstad is where most of it happens. A fringing reef runs close to shore all along the leeward south side, dropping from a shallow shelf into a wall in warm, clear, current-light water, so a huge amount of the island can be dived straight off the beach, which is why Curacao is famous for shore diving. The signature sites cluster near the capital. The Tugboat lies in five meters of a protected cove at Caracas Bay, so encrusted in tube sponge and coral that snorkellers enjoy it too, while the Superior Producer, a cargo ship that sank in 1977, sits upright at 30 meters just outside the harbor and is rated one of the Caribbean's best wreck dives. Add Mushroom Forest's coral heads, the Blue Room cavern and dozens of reef walls, and there is enough for a fortnight. Two well-established operators near Willemstad, a large PADI 5-Star boat outfit and a smaller shore-diving specialist, cover everything from a first Discover Scuba dive to guided wreck and night dives, in water that stays warm and calm year round.

Bimini is where you dive with great hammerheads. From late autumn to spring, huge great hammerhead sharks, some over four meters long, gather in the shallows off North Bimini, and dive boats out of Alice Town put divers on the sand in about six meters 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.

Chuuk Lagoon, still known to divers as Truk, is the greatest wreck-diving destination on earth. It was the Imperial Japanese Navy's main forward anchorage in the Pacific, and over two days in February 1944 the US carrier raid Operation Hailstone sank the fleet at its moorings. More than fifty ships and scores of aircraft went down in a sheltered lagoon, and they are still here, upright and intact in warm, clear water. You dive holds full of tanks, trucks, aircraft, sake bottles and gas masks on the Fujikawa Maru, the Nippo Maru and the San Francisco Maru, swim the coral-crusted superstructure of the Shinkoku Maru, and drop onto engines and bridges wrapped in soft coral and reef fish. Depths range from shallow, light-filled decks that Open Water divers can enjoy to deep penetration dives for technical teams. It is a sunken time capsule and a war grave at once, guided by Chuukese crews whose families have kept its stories since the raid.

The Dahlak reefs are among the least-dived in the entire Red Sea, and that is the whole point. More than two hundred islands sit off Massawa in warm, clear water, and because Eritrea has been closed to mass tourism for decades the hard-coral gardens, reef sharks, turtles, rays and schooling fish have had little pressure. There are no dive resorts and no crowds. You dive from a boat arranged out of Massawa, often sleeping aboard or camping on an island, with a small operation that carries its own compressor and gear. Visibility is good and the sites range from shallow coral for easy dives to walls and the occasional wreck. This is expedition diving rather than a resort week, which means self-sufficiency and permits, and in return you get Red Sea reefs the way they looked a generation ago, with almost nobody else in the water.

The most isolated inhabited waters on earth are also among the clearest: visibility off Hanga Roa reaches 60 meters, water holds 20 to 27 C year-round, and the volcanic topography of drop-offs, arches, and caverns comes with about 140 species found nowhere else. The island's first dive center opened in 1980, founded by Henri and Michel Garcia of Cousteau expedition lineage, and remains a Cousteau Divers conservation member. The signature photograph, a sunken moai replica resting on the sand off Hanga Roa, belongs on any diver's list, and no other destination pairs a dive week with the archaeology of Rapa Nui above the waterline.

Wolf and Darwin sit on most serious divers' shortlist for the best dive sites on the planet: scalloped hammerheads schooling by the hundreds, and from June through November the world's most reliable aggregation of whale sharks passing Darwin's Arch. The archipelago adds animals no other ocean has, marine iguanas grazing underwater, penguins on the equator, fur seals in the shallows, and the marine reserve caps operators, so the sites stay wild. The remote northern islands are liveaboard-only, but land-based diving from Puerto Ayora and San Cristobal puts hammerheads at Gordon Rocks and Kicker Rock within reach of a confident recreational diver.

Grace Bay is the launch point for some of the most dramatic wall diving in the Caribbean. A short boat ride offshore, the shallow Caicos bank ends and the reef falls away in a sheer wall that plunges past two thousand meters, its top edge starting in the easy range around ten to twenty meters. Divers drift the wall past big barrel sponges, black coral and sea fans while turtles, eagle rays, reef sharks and the occasional passing hammerhead cruise the blue beyond the drop-off. The Grace Bay reef itself sits inside a national park and stays calm and clear behind the barrier, ideal for gentle warm-up dives, while the marquee walls lie a little further out at Northwest Point, West Caicos and French Cay, all run as day trips from the island. Visibility routinely runs thirty meters and beyond, the water is warm year-round, and the wall diving is what put the Turks and Caicos on the map for divers. It is world-class diving reached from one of the most comfortable island bases in the region.

Majuro is the everyday diving of the Marshall Islands, the reachable counterpoint to Bikini's technical pilgrimage. The capital atoll rings a huge lagoon, and just outside it the reef falls away into clear, warm ocean, with visibility over 30 meters and water around 29 degrees year-round. Divers come for the outer-reef walls and passes, coral gardens on the lagoon side, a scatter of WWII wrecks from the atoll's wartime role, and reliable numbers of gray reef and other sharks patrolling the drop-offs. Because so few divers reach this corner of the Pacific, the sites are quiet and the reef is in good health. Majuro is also the practical launch point for the Marshalls: it is where you fly in, find the country's established dive operator, and can arrange onward technical trips to Bikini. For a diver who wants big ocean, sharks and wrecks without crowds, this is a properly off-the-map base.

Blue Corner is the most celebrated dive site in Micronesia. Hook into the wall in 1-3 knots of current and watch gray reef sharks, whitetips, barracuda, and Napoleon wrasse pass at eye level. Add the largest WWII wreck graveyard in the Pacific, Jellyfish Lake, and German Channel manta cleaning station, Palau is the most complete advanced dive destination in the Pacific.

Pohnpei offers some of the least-crowded diving in Micronesia, wrapped around one of the wettest, greenest islands in the Pacific. A wide barrier reef encircles the island with dozens of passes, and inside and outside them you find sheer coral walls, deep channels and colorful gardens rather than the wreck history of Chuuk to the west. Reef sharks patrol the passes, big schools of trevally and barracuda stack up in the current, and Pohnpei has its own resident manta cleaning station where the rays come in to be groomed. Because almost no one dives here, the reef is healthy and the boats are quiet. Pohnpei also pairs diving with rare land adventures: the surf breaks that made the island a cult name, waterfalls in the jungle interior, and Nan Madol, the vast basalt ruined city offshore. It is a diver's island for people who want reef, solitude and a genuine sense of the frontier.

More fish species and coral diversity than anywhere else on Earth, Raja Ampat consistently registers more species per dive than the next-closest destination. Even the snorkeling here surpasses most destinations' scuba diving. Remote West Papua archipelago that remains genuinely difficult to reach, which has preserved its reefs in near-pristine condition.

One of the last truly unexplored dive frontiers. Strict government permit limits mean very few boats operate here, and the reefs have never experienced the volume of dive traffic that affected the Egyptian Red Sea. Sanganeb Atoll produces hammerhead aggregations; Sha'ab Rumi has Jacques Cousteau's original research station visible on the reef.

Tiger 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 meters 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.

Tufi is the only place in Papua New Guinea where you dive fjords. Ancient lava flows off Cape Nelson left deep, steep-walled inlets, misnamed fjords locally, that run inland between forested ridges, and their calm, tannin-tinged water is a muck diver's playground of seahorses, pipefish, mandarinfish and mud crabs. Out beyond the headland, offshore coral reefs and seamounts sit in clear blue water with the wide-angle scenery and pelagics the fjords lack, and off the old wharf lie the wartime PT-boat wrecks from Tufi's role as an American patrol-boat base in 1942. Because the fjords are always sheltered, Tufi is one of the few PNG resorts that dives right through the year. The setting is as much a draw as the diving, with outrigger-canoe villages, tattooed faces and clifftop views over the sea and the peaks of the Owen Stanley Range.

Yap built its reputation on manta rays. In the channels that cut through the island's reef, notably the Mi'l Channel and Goofnuw Channel, resident reef manta rays queue at coral cleaning stations while small fish pick them clean, and divers kneel on the sand and watch them soar overhead at arm's length. Yap runs mantas year-round, and in the December to April mating season the channels fill with courtship trains of several animals at once, one of the most reliable manta encounters on the planet. The state protected these waters as a manta sanctuary back in 2008, among the first anywhere. Beyond the mantas, Yap offers walls, gray reef and gray nurse sharks, and mandarinfish that emerge at dusk, all on reef so remote it sees a fraction of the divers of better-known destinations. Above water, a living culture of stone money villages and thatched meeting houses makes surface intervals as memorable as the dives.

Jardines de la Reina is the closest thing the Caribbean has to a time capsule. Protected as a marine park since 1996 and off-limits to fishing, its reefs still hold what most of the region has lost: dense schools of snapper and jacks, Goliath grouper the size of oil drums, and sharks that approach rather than flee. Six species work these waters, Caribbean reef, silky, nurse, lemon, blacktip and the occasional great hammerhead, with whale sharks passing through in season and American crocodiles patrolling the mangrove channels. One operator holds the whole park. Avalon Cuban Diving Center runs the sole concession, capping the archipelago at a few thousand divers a year from a small liveaboard fleet and the floating Tortuga hotel.

Channel diving where open-ocean currents deliver whale sharks, manta rays, and schooling hammerheads through narrow underwater passages. Resort-based living with house reefs for easy multiple daily dives, and liveaboards for divers who want to cover the atoll spread. The most complete combination of luxury travel and world-class pelagic diving available.

A spring inside a collapsed karst dome, lit through a hole in the roof, with prehistoric fossil beds in the walls. It is the accessible counterpoint to cave country: cavern diving under daylight, open to certified recreational divers.

The densest concentration of underwater cave systems anywhere in the world, and the place people fly to in order to get cave certified. Ginnie Springs, Devil's Ear, Peacock and Madison Blue are all within a short drive.

Europe's largest naturally frozen lake surface, and one of the few places you can train and dive under ice with an established operator rather than an expedition.