Scuba Diving in July

Cape Maclear is where you learn to dive inside a freshwater aquarium. This corner of Lake Malawi National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1984, holds more than 850 species of cichlid fish that live nowhere else on earth, most of them small, curious and brilliantly colored. The water is warm, clear and free of current or tide, which makes it one of the gentlest places anywhere to earn a PADI certification. Granite boulders drop away underwater into swim-throughs and walls thick with fish, and there is no salt, no surge and nothing that bites. Divers used to coral reefs come away surprised by how much life a lake can hold.

The outer Boka Kotorska and the Lustica coast pack an unusual density of diving for the Adriatic: WWII wrecks, the Yugoslav navy's submarine tunnels bored into the peninsula, caves, and walls, all minutes by boat from Herceg Novi's harbor. Two established clubs run year-round bases on the promenade, teaching PADI ladders through Divemaster and taking children from age eight on intro dives, at prices well under the Western Mediterranean's. Summer visibility runs to thirty meters, and the submarine pens alone justify the trip: nowhere else do you fin through the Cold War's actual garage.

Key Largo pairs the continental US's only living coral barrier reef, protected inside a national marine sanctuary, with one of the world's great wreck lineups: the USS Spiegel Grove, a 155-meter landing ship in 15 to 40 meters that takes two dives just to tour the outside, plus the Duane and Bibb. The infrastructure matches: Rainbow Reef is one of the largest dive centers in North America, a PADI Career Development Center running a full boat fleet and three night dives a week, while Horizon Divers carries the technical ladder through advanced wreck, trimix, and rebreather. Everything is day-boat, no liveaboard required, and Christ of the Abyss remains the hemisphere's most photographed underwater statue.

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.

The Perhentians are where a lot of travelers get certified, and for good reason. The two islands sit inside a marine park in warm, clear water, the reefs start in the shallows straight off the beach, and the diving is gentle enough that a first Open Water course here is relaxed rather than daunting. Green and hawksbill turtles are common, blacktip reef sharks cruise the shallows at sites like Shark Point, and there are bumphead parrotfish, cuttlefish, moray eels and healthy hard-coral gardens. For something with structure, the Sugar Wreck, a cargo ship that sank in 2000, sits in around 18 meters and has become a soft-coral-covered fish magnet, with a couple of other wrecks nearby for qualified divers. Prices are among the lowest in the region and the pace is barefoot and unhurried, which makes the Perhentians a natural counterpoint to the deep, current-fed diving of Sipadan on the far side of the country. Come outside the monsoon, when the islands are open and the sea is at its clearest.

Budget Caribbean reef diving on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest in the world. PADI Open Water courses here are among the cheapest in the entire Caribbean. Whale sharks congregate at cleaning stations in spring, turtles are present year-round, and the wall diving off West Bay rivals anything in the region at a fraction of the cost.

The USAT Liberty, a 120m US Army cargo ship torpedoed in 1942, lies just 30m from shore in 5-30m of water, encrusted in coral and surrounded by reef life. It is the most accessible major wreck dive in the world, and one of the best macro sites in Bali for pygmy seahorses, ghost pipefish, and nudibranchs.

Ambergris Caye is where most people first put their head underwater in Belize, and for good reason. The barrier reef runs a few hundred meters off San Pedro, and the Hol Chan Marine Reserve protects a cut through it that concentrates fish in extraordinary numbers. A single tank at Hol Chan puts you among green moray eels, southern stingrays, Nassau grouper, schooling snapper and spotted eagle rays, while the neighboring Shark Ray Alley draws nurse sharks and rays into the shallows. It is reef diving you can do on your first open-water certification, with warm water and easy conditions, and the same shops run the deeper trips to Turneffe Atoll and the Blue Hole once you are ready to go further.

Apia is the easiest base for diving in Samoa, a capital where the reef starts almost at the doorstep. A five-minute walk from the town center, the Palolo Deep Marine Reserve drops from a shallow coral garden into a deep blue hole you can snorkel or dive straight off the shore, and the dive boats out of the Apia Marina reach a run of reef walls, drop-offs and swim-throughs within minutes of the harbor. This is warm, clear, low-traffic Pacific diving: green and hawksbill turtles, reef sharks, lionfish, moray eels, schooling jacks and dense soft coral, with barely another boat in sight because Samoa sees a fraction of the divers of Fiji or French Polynesia. Operators run everything from a first Discover Scuba session to full certification, and the same shops guide snorkelling trips to the giant clam sanctuary and, on the calm days, out to the To Sua ocean trench on the south coast. Add year-round warm water and sites suited to beginners and experienced divers alike, and Apia works as both a place to learn and a place to log relaxed, high-visibility reef dives.

Atauro sits over what surveys call the richest reef on the planet: a 2016 Conservation International rapid assessment recorded an average of 253 reef-fish species per dive site, the highest ever measured. The island drops steeply into the deep Ombai-Wetar Strait, so healthy coral gardens, walls and slopes start meters from the shore and the water stays clear all year, even in the rainy season. Dives run straight off the beach onto vivid house reefs, or by short boat to walls patrolled by trevally, tuna and reef sharks, with turtles, mandarinfish and the odd passing cetacean from the strait. Two established dive operations, one a PADI resort working with the marine-protected-area effort, run the sites for divers of every level while the island stays quiet and undeveloped, a rare combination of world-class reef and unhurried island life.

Saint Kitts sits on the edge of a wide, sheltered channel between it and Nevis, and Basseterre is where the island's dive boats leave from. The diving is a mix of easy coral reefs, drop-offs along the island shelf, and a set of shipwrecks close to the capital, including the freighter River Taw and other hulls that now sit as artificial reefs full of fish. Because the water on the leeward side is calm for much of the year, the sites suit newer divers learning to certify as much as they suit divers who want relaxed reef and wreck dives without long crossings. Resident life includes turtles, southern stingrays, nurse sharks and the occasional reef shark, and the two long-running operators here run small boats and keep groups tight. For a Caribbean dive base that is quiet, walkable from the cruise pier, and a short ride from Frigate Bay, Basseterre is the pick.

Batroun is the home of Lebanese diving. The old Phoenician town on the northern coast has some of the clearest water in the country, and its dive centers run out to a mix of reef, cave and wreck that most people never associate with the eastern Mediterranean. The signature dives are wrecks, among them the Alice B, a ship sunk off the coast in the 1980s and now lying at around 35 meters, and the Souffleur, a French submarine lost in the Second World War at similar depth, along with cave sites such as the Selaata air cave. Water is warm and calm through the summer, visibility opens up off the north coast, and the shore and marina make an easy base with the diving a short boat ride out. Casual snorkelers and first-timers can try the water off the reefs, while the deeper wrecks give certified divers a reason to come back. It is the natural place to put Lebanon underwater on the map.

Bayahibe is where the Dominican Republic's diving is concentrated, and for good reason. The signature dive is the St. George, a 73-meter freighter sunk on purpose in 1999 that now sits upright in around 40 meters, draped in sponges and patrolled by barracuda. Short boat rides reach the wall and coral gardens off Catalina Island, the shallow reefs around Saona inside Cotubanama National Park, and cavern dives in the area's flooded limestone. Water is warm year-round and the protected south-coast sites often have little current, which makes this a good place to train as well as to log easy fun dives. Two long-running, owner-led centers anchor the village.

Beqa Lagoon is where you dive with big sharks in the open, no cage between you and the animals. Off Pacific Harbour, the Shark Reef Marine Reserve was set up in 2004 as Fiji's first marine protected area, funded by a levy on every dive and patrolled by local wardens, and in 2014 it became the country's first national marine park. On a single feed dive you can share the water with up to eight species, from tawny nurse and gray reef sharks up to hefty bull sharks and, in the cooler months, the occasional tiger. The lagoon is ringed by roughly three hundred kilometers of barrier reef, so beyond the shark arena there are soft coral bommies and wrecks, and the whole thing sits close enough to the main island to dive without a liveaboard.

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.

Bonito's limestone plateau filters rainwater into rivers and sinkholes of near-perfect clarity, and Lagoa Misteriosa is the showpiece: a flooded karst shaft more than 75 meters deep where visibility can reach 60 meters, an inland dive that feels like flying. The same reserve runs the Rio da Prata, a two-kilometer drift snorkel among dourado and piraputanga, so one property covers the whole spectrum from discovery float to deep certification dive. Bonito also invented Brazil's regulated-ecotourism model: every site has a fixed daily quota and a mandatory guide, so the water never crowds. Freshwater diving at this clarity and scale does not exist anywhere else in the Americas.

Marseille is where organized diving grew up: the Cousteau-Gagnan aqualung was trialed on this coast, and FFESSM, the French federation that structured the sport worldwide through CMAS, has been headquartered here since its founding. The water still teaches: Calanques National Park, Europe's only national park wrapped around a major city, protects limestone drop-offs, wrecks, and red-coral walls between the Pointe Rouge boats and the port of Cassis. The multi-federation school density, FFESSM, PADI, and SSI side by side, is itself unusual, and the city means the non-diving half of a couple has the better afternoon, not the worse one.

Cirkewwa, on Malta's northern tip beside the Gozo ferry, is the island's most celebrated shore dive and one of the best in the Mediterranean. Two purpose-sunk wrecks sit within a short swim of the entry steps: the Rozi, a 30-meter tug scuttled in 1992 and now upright at around 30 meters, and the P29, a 52-meter former patrol boat sent down in 2007 with an easily penetrated engine room. Between them runs the Cirkewwa Arch, a natural rock archway on a reef wall that draws barracuda, groupers and the occasional seahorse. Everything is reachable from land, so there is no boat schedule to keep, the water is warm and clear from late spring through autumn, and the site suits training dives and photographers as much as experienced wreck divers. Two established, instructor-led centers run daily guided dives and courses here.

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 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.

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.

El Hierro is the diving Spain keeps quiet: the Mar de las Calmas marine reserve, protected since 1996, is routinely rated the country's best underwater, and El Bajon is the reason, twin volcanic pinnacles rising from 100 meters to near the surface with visibility that runs 20 to 40 meters. The village behind it, La Restinga, is a working harbor with boat rides under ten minutes to the sites, no mass tourism, and rays, barracuda, and turtles as the standard cast. The 2011 Tagoro eruption added a still-recovering volcanic seabed nearby. The whole island is a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and it dives twelve months a year.

Mediterranean diving is a different proposition to tropical, cooler, clearer, and defined by geology and archaeology rather than reef life. Elounda's standout site is the partially submerged ancient city of Olous: wall remnants, column bases, and mosaic floors visible in 2-6m of crystalline water. Spinalonga island adds wall and wreck context. For divers who have done the tropical circuit, Mediterranean structure diving, with its underwater archaeology and dramatic limestone formations, offers a genuinely distinct perspective.

Espiritu Santo holds the SS President Coolidge, the largest and most accessible shipwreck in the world you can dive from shore. The Coolidge was a 200 meter luxury liner turned WWII troopship that struck friendly mines off Luganville in 1942 and sank in the channel, and it now lies on its side from about 20 meters down to past 70, close enough to reach from a private beach in a three minute boat hop. Divers swim its cargo holds, gun turrets, promenade and the porcelain relief of a woman and unicorn known as The Lady, in warm clear water. A short way along the coast, Million Dollar Point is a second WWII site where the departing US military bulldozed jeeps, bulldozers and cranes into the sea, now a reef of coral-crusted machinery in easy depths. Between them the island offers reef walls, caverns and technical dives on the Coolidge's deeper engine rooms, making Santo one of the great wreck-diving destinations on Earth.

Gozo packs Malta's most dramatic diving into a small island, and much of it is shore- or short-boat-accessible within minutes. The signature site is the Blue Hole at Dwejra, a natural limestone chimney on the west coast that opens through an underwater arch onto a reef wall, still spectacular after the collapse of the neighboring Azure Window. On the sheltered south coast at Xatt l-Ahmar lie three purpose-sunk wrecks, the passenger ferries MV Karwela and MV Cominoland and the patrol boat MV Xlendi, sitting upright between 20 and 40 meters and among the most photographed wrecks in the Mediterranean. Add the Inland Sea tunnel and the caverns and drop-offs around Dwejra, and Gozo rewards several days underwater. Two long-established, instructor-led centers anchor the island's dive scene.

The world's most famous reef and still one of the most biologically rich. Day trips from Cairns reach the Outer Reef in 90 minutes, clownfish, giant clams, Maori wrasse, sea turtles, and reef sharks on every dive. Liveaboards push into the pristine Coral Sea for encounters that far exceed day-trip diving. The most accessible bucket-list dive destination for first-time divers.

Green Island packs some of Taiwan's best and most accessible diving into a rim you can drive around in half an hour. More than twenty sites circle the island, from gentle shore reefs off Shilang and Chaikou to boat dives on coral walls, drop-offs and current-swept points where jacks, barracuda and turtles pass. The water is warm and often very clear, and the reefs are healthy hard-coral gardens; the island is also home to one of the largest brain-coral colonies ever recorded, hundreds of years old. Between dives you can soak at Zhaori, a rare seawater hot spring fed by geothermal heat right at the shoreline, one of only about three such springs in the world. Ferries and short flights from Taitung make it an easy add-on, and the island's dive shops run everything from a first Discover Scuba to full certification and guided fun dives.

The Manta Scramble off Kabira Ishizaki is one of the most reliable reef-manta encounters on earth: five to ten mantas circling a cleaning station on a single dive through the season, with three more dedicated manta sites, Manta City Point, Yonara Channel, Panari Big Corner, spreading the odds across the Yaeyamas. The Kuroshio Current keeps the water warm and the hard coral healthy, the sites suit newer divers when the channels behave, and the shop that discovered the Scramble, UMICOZA, still dives it. For the ambitious, Yonaguni's winter hammerhead schools sit one island-hop further into the far south.

Kaş is where Turkey dives, and the theme is history: a C-47 Dakota WWII transport plane rests near Fener Cove patrolled by groupers and barracuda, ancient amphora fields litter the seabed, and a full-scale replica of the 3,300-year-old Uluburun ship, the Bronze Age wreck whose excavation rewrote maritime archaeology, was sunk here as a dive site. More than thirty sites sit within a half hour by boat, twenty-plus centers work them to PADI, SSI, and CMAS standards, and the visibility runs past thirty meters through the summer core. It completes the town's underwater identity alongside the freediving that already made Kaş famous.

The only place on Earth where you can dive manta ray cleaning stations in the morning and watch Komodo dragons from a beach in the afternoon. Cold-water upwellings from the Indian Ocean fuel reef systems with exceptional fish density, and the range of dive environments, drift, wall, reef, muck, is unusually wide for a single park.

La Parguera is Puerto Rico's best wall dive, a stretch of reef edge on the quiet southwest coast that falls away into the abyss. About twenty minutes out from the village, the reef top sits around 55 to 65 feet and then drops as a sheer wall past 130 feet before shelving off toward the deep sea floor, a face hung with black coral, sea fans, sponges and swim-throughs and patrolled by turtles, eagle rays and the occasional passing pelagic. Because the south coast gets far less swell and rain than the north, visibility here is often the clearest on the island, and the wall runs for miles with more than thirty named sites, so operators pick the section that fits the day and the group. Back in the village, La Parguera is also one of Puerto Rico's three bioluminescent bays and a base for mangrove-channel boat trips, so a dive day pairs easily with a glowing-water night. It is an unhurried, local-feeling town, a long way in spirit from the San Juan resorts.

Larnaca exists on the dive map for one reason, the Zenobia. She was a brand-new 172-meter Swedish-built roll-on roll-off ferry that capsized and sank in the bay on her maiden voyage in June 1980, still loaded with more than a hundred articulated lorries, and she now lies on her port side between about 16 and 42 meters just outside the harbor. Divers consistently vote her one of the ten best wreck dives in the world, and the short boat ride from Larnaca means you are down on the wreck within minutes rather than after a long crossing. The water is warm and clear for much of the year, and the wreck has range: shallow passes over the car deck and the upper hull for newer divers, and deeper penetration of the cargo holds, the accommodation and the bridge for those with the training. Around the Zenobia the local centers also run reef and cavern dives, so a week here mixes the headline wreck with easier days.

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.

Moheli is the wild heart of the Comoros and one of the Indian Ocean's best-kept diving secrets. The waters around it form the Moheli Marine Park, the country's first protected area, set in the northern Mozambique Channel, a stretch recognized as one of the richest zones of marine biodiversity anywhere. Diving off the islets at Nioumachoua, you drop onto dense hard and soft coral among green and hawksbill turtles, which nest on the park's beaches in nationally important numbers, alongside reef fish in clouds, moray eels, rays and pods of dolphins. From July to October humpback whales move through to calve, and snorkellers and divers sometimes hear and see them; dugongs and, in the deep offshore water, the living-fossil coelacanth, share the same sea. There is almost no development and few other divers, so this is remote, low-impact diving with an eco-lodge for a base, closer to how reefs looked a generation ago.

Vava'u is Tonga's diving heart, and Neiafu's dive boats reach more than fifty sites inside a compact, sheltered island group. The signature dives are the caves: Swallows Cave, a cathedral-like chamber you can enter on the surface with shafts of light falling through schooling fish, and Mariner's Cave, an air-filled chamber reached only by a short breath-hold swim down and through a submerged tunnel. Beyond the caves are coral gardens, drop-offs, swim-throughs and pinnacles with visibility that regularly runs past forty meters, plus the wreck of the Clan MacWilliam, a 126-meter steamer that sank in Neiafu harbor in 1927. Water sits around twenty-five to twenty-eight degrees in the diving months, and because Vava'u is a maze of protected channels, dive days stay calm and the surface intervals come with island scenery. In the austral winter, humpback song often carries clearly underwater while you dive.

Nevis is a single green volcano sitting in warm, protected water, and the diving here trades big drama for calm, uncrowded reef. The signature site is Monkey Shoals, a wide reef a few miles out in the channel between Nevis and Saint Kitts, where ledges and coral heads draw turtles, nurse sharks, rays, seahorses and, in season, passing pelagics. Closer in there are gentle reef and shallow dives well suited to beginners and to divers who want to certify somewhere quiet, along with a scattering of small wrecks. Because so few boats work these sites, it is common to have a reef to yourself. The island's dive base sits on the sheltered north coast at Oualie Beach, so entry and exit are easy and surface intervals come with a view back up to the cloud-capped peak.

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.

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.

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.

Tabarka is Tunisia's dive capital, a small Mediterranean port on the Coral Coast where forested hills meet a rocky, coral-rich seabed. The reefs sit minutes from the marina and are built around dramatic granite architecture rather than tropical reef, with the signature site, the Tunnels, a labyrinth of some twenty swim-throughs, caves and arches at moderate depth. The headline residents are big dusky groupers of forty kilograms and more that approach divers without fear, alongside moray eels, barracuda, red coral and gorgonians, and there are Second World War wrecks for qualified divers. The clubs cluster at the marina and run on the CMAS and French-federation model, handling everyone from first-time try dives to certification, with equivalencies for PADI and other cards taken as routine. It is easy shore-and-boat diving in warm summer water with good visibility.

Aliwal Shoal, a fossilized dune five kilometers off Umkomaas, hosts one of the most reliable shark aggregations in diving: ragged-tooth sharks gather to mate on the reef from July to November, tiger and blacktip encounters run alongside, and the Nebo and Produce wrecks round out a site routinely listed among the world's top ten. The whole reef sits inside a Marine Protected Area, and winter adds the sardine run's energy offshore and humpbacks on migration. Getting there is part of the story: zodiacs surf-launch through the Umkomaas river mouth, and the ride out is a workout before the first descent.

Vis was a closed military island until 1989, and its waters kept what the rest of the Mediterranean lost. The signature dive is a B-17G Flying Fortress that ditched offshore in November 1944, sitting upright at 65 to 72m and considered one of the best-preserved WWII aircraft wrecks in the world; a B-24 Liberator lies nearby, making Vis a rare double aircraft-wreck destination. Around the headline wrecks: walls, caves, Roman-era amphorae fields, and the clear water Komiza's fishermen have worked for centuries. The deep aircraft are technical dives, but recreational divers get honest reward at ordinary depths, and both local centers train from beginner through full trimix.

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.

Andros 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-kilometer-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.

Fakarava is where you drift a coral pass inside a shark kingdom. The atoll is a UNESCO Man and Biosphere reserve, and its southern channel, Tumakohua, funnels the whole lagoon's tide through a narrow cut where hundreds of gray reef sharks hang in the current in what divers call the wall of sharks. Come the June and July full moons, thousands of camouflage grouper mass here to spawn and the sharks hunt them in a nightly frenzy that has drawn film crews from around the world. The northern Garuae pass, the biggest in the country, adds manta cleaning stations, big schooling fish and its own shark packs. You dive both passes on the incoming tide, carried over coral gardens that have never been commercially damaged, and between dives the village of Rotoava and the tiny hamlet of Tetamanu sit almost alone on the reef.

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.

Gizo pairs a great wreck with great reef. Its signature dive is the Toa Maru, a large Japanese armed transport sunk in 1943 and now one of the most intact big wrecks in the Pacific, lying on a slope so you can work from shallow to deep, holds still packed with trucks, a tank, medical supplies, sake bottles and ammunition. Around it the Western Solomons deliver everything else: coral walls and drop-offs, current-fed reefs thick with fish, gray reef and other sharks, and a run of downed WWII warplanes on the sand, including a Japanese Zero and American fighters. The reefs off Gizo are healthy and lightly dived, and the town makes an easy base with a short boat hop to most sites. Divers work with a long-established local operator whose crew has decades on these reefs, running small boats to keep groups tight. It is wreck-and-reef diving with real history, in a corner of the Pacific few travelers reach.

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.

Kimbe Bay sits at the heart of the Coral Triangle, the richest marine region on the planet, and its reefs carry more than half the world's known coral species. The diving is built around bommies and seamounts that rise from very deep water almost to the surface, so a single dive can run from a coral-covered top thick with anthias and fusiliers down a wall into blue water patrolled by barracuda and gray reef sharks. Sites like Bradford Shoals, Inglis Shoal and Susan's Reef are close enough to dive from day boats, and the shallow patch reefs make easy work for newer divers and snorkellers. The bay is a designated Mission Blue Hope Spot and has been a marine research focus for decades, so the reefs are unusually healthy. Beyond the bay itself, liveaboards push out to the Witu Islands and the Fathers Reefs for bigger fish and untouched walls.

The Isle of Pines is New Caledonia's postcard island, and beneath its turquoise water lies some of the country's clearest, most sheltered diving. From the base at Kuto, boats run to about twenty sites around the Gadji lagoon in the island's northwest, where coral gardens, walls and swim-through caves sit in visibility that regularly runs beyond thirty meters. This is where you drift over healthy hard coral with green turtles, whitetip and gray reef sharks, eagle rays and clouds of reef fish, and slip into caverns like the Grotte de la Troisieme where light beams cut the dark. The reefs here are among the least disturbed in the territory, protected by the island's small population and Kanak custom, and the same waters draw nurse sharks and, in the deeper passes, bigger pelagic visitors. Between dives you surface to the Araucaria pines, white sand and clear lagoon that make the Isle of Pines one of the most beautiful islands in the Pacific.

Sipadan is the best-known dive in Malaysia and one of the great walls anywhere. It is the country's only oceanic island, a coral pinnacle rising more than 600 meters straight off the seabed in the Celebes Sea, and the drop-off means big pelagic action within a few fin-kicks of the surface. Barracuda Point draws the tornado of chevron barracuda it is named for, green and hawksbill turtles are on nearly every dive, and schools of bigeye trevally, bumphead parrotfish and the occasional gray reef and hammerhead shark patrol the blue. To protect it, Sabah Parks caps access at 176 permits a day, issued only through the dive resorts, so you book a package on Mabul or Kapalai and your operator secures the permit. Base yourself on Mabul and you also get some of the world's best muck diving on the doorstep, with frogfish, flamboyant cuttlefish, mandarinfish and blue-ringed octopus around the stilt villages and artificial reefs while you wait for your Sipadan day. It is warm, current-fed, world-class diving that suits confident open-water divers upward.

Marovo Lagoon is the largest saltwater lagoon on earth, a maze of reef-fringed islands enclosed by a double barrier reef in the Western Solomons, and its diving is as varied as its geography. On the sheltered inner reefs you drift over coral gardens and past villages built on stilts; at the passes and outer walls the lagoon meets The Slot, the deep channel where Pacific War fleets once passed, and the water turns serious. Divers come for schooling hammerheads that gather off the reef between about May and August, for mantas, eagle rays, gray reef sharks and turtles, and for the WWII ship and aircraft wrecks scattered through the area. The lagoon's long-running island eco-resort is crewed entirely by people from surrounding Marovo villages, trained in-house, and its non-profit has funded local schooling and healthcare, so a dive week here directly supports the communities whose reef it is. It is remote, quiet, current-fed diving with a strong sense of place.

Munda is the easiest world-class diving in the Solomon Islands, a quiet village on New Georgia with a runway built by the Japanese in WWII and now served by direct flights from Brisbane. Off its shore lie more than thirty dive sites within short boat runs, and the mix is unusually rich: steep coral walls dropping into blue water, caverns and cuts, healthy hard and soft coral, and sharks and schooling barracuda in the current. The war is still in the water and on the reef, with a P-39 Airacobra fighter and a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber sitting on the sand, and a US wartime dump site scattered with ordnance. Munda is also the doorway to the wider Western Province and the Marovo Lagoon beyond. What sets it apart is the operator: a Solomon Islander-led dive center that has trained local guides and built one of the Pacific's genuine community dive-tourism stories, so the diving comes with real local knowledge of reef and Kastom alike.

Noumea opens straight onto the South Lagoon, the diving heart of the world's largest enclosed lagoon and a UNESCO World Heritage site. A short boat ride out, the reef passes at Dumbea and Boulari funnel clear ocean water over coral walls and drop-offs, and the classic day trip runs to the Amedee lighthouse, a 19th-century iron tower on a tiny sand cay ringed by dive sites. Divers here meet green turtles, gray reef and whitetip sharks, schooling barracuda and, at the right sites, manta rays and the occasional dugong grazing the seagrass, one of the last healthy populations of the sea cow anywhere. Because the barrier reef sits well offshore, the inner lagoon stays calm and warm, so sites range from gentle coral gardens for first dives to current-swept passes for the experienced. Wreck fans can drop on the Dieppoise, a patrol boat scuttled in the bay. It is a rare place to log easy, high-visibility dives on a protected reef system that has never been heavily fished.

Rangiroa is the classic Tuamotu pass dive, a giant atoll where the whole lagoon breathes through two narrow channels and pulls the big animals with it. On an incoming tide at the Tiputa pass you fly over the reef with the current while gray reef sharks, eagle rays and schools of barracuda hold station around you, and a resident pod of bottlenose dolphins comes to surf the flow and play with divers, one of the few places in the world where that happens reliably. In the cooler months great hammerheads and manta rays move through, and the outer walls fall away into deep blue. Between dives the lagoon itself is a draw, from the pink sand motu to the natural aquarium shallows, and the passes work again on the outgoing tide for a completely different dive.

Bermuda is the Shipwreck Capital of the Atlantic, and it earns the title. The island is the exposed tip of an undersea volcano ringed by the most northerly coral reefs on earth, a shallow, treacherous barrier that has claimed more than 300 documented ships over five centuries, from Spanish galleons and Civil War blockade runners to 19th and 20th century steamers. Many of those wrecks lie in only 5 to 15 meters of clear, warm water on the reef flats, so they are broken open, coral-encrusted and lit up, and divers of modest experience can swim them, while snorkellers enjoy the shallowest. The Cristobal Colon, the largest wreck in Bermudian waters, the paddle-wheeler Mary Celestia off the South Shore, and the Constellation, whose scattered cargo inspired the novel The Deep, are among dozens on offer, alongside living reef with parrotfish, barracuda and the occasional turtle. The Royal Naval Dockyard at the West End is the base of Bermuda's oldest dive company, running out of the old Victorian yard, and the Gulf Stream keeps the water warm enough to dive from spring to autumn. Few places pack this much accessible history and reef into water this shallow and this clear.

Silfra is the only place on earth where you dive directly in the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The fissure is fed by glacial meltwater that has filtered through lava fields for decades before it wells up, and the result is visibility routinely measured at 100 meters and more, the clearest widely-dived water anywhere. The site sits inside Thingvellir National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the seat of the world's oldest parliament, and the water holds a constant 2 to 4 degrees, which is why every dive is a drysuit dive. It is a bucket-list dive that actually survives its own reputation: the blue of the Silfra Cathedral section does not photograph as well as it looks.

Taveuni is the soft coral capital of the world, and the reason is the Somosomo Strait that runs between it and Vanua Levu. Tides force nutrient rich water through the narrow channel, feeding a thirty two kilometer stretch called the Rainbow Reef where the current switches on the soft corals like a light. The signature dive is the Great White Wall, a sloped face that drops away under a blanket of pale lilac soft coral, listed among the top ten dive sites in the world. It is drift diving tied to the tide table, so trips run on slack and building current, and the same waters bring gray reef sharks, barracuda schools and the occasional manta. Two long established island operators run the strait daily, and the house reefs off the resort jetties can be dived on any tide.

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.

Bikini Atoll is the greatest deep-wreck dive on the planet and a bucket-list pilgrimage for technical divers. In 1946 the US Navy assembled a fleet of captured and surplus warships here for Operation Crossroads, two atomic tests that sank them where they floated. The lagoon now holds the USS Saratoga, the only diveable aircraft carrier in the world, her 270 meter flight deck sitting upright in the blue, alongside the Japanese flagship battleship Nagato that led the attack on Pearl Harbor, the battleship USS Arkansas and the submarine USS Apogon. Visibility runs 40 to 60 meters over these steel giants, but the diving is serious: average depths around 50 meters and long decompression put Bikini firmly in the technical realm. Add the human weight of the place, an atoll whose people were moved off for the tests and have never fully returned, and this is diving as history, reached only by a small liveaboard on a long ocean crossing.

The world's premier destination for schooling hammerheads. No accommodation, no day visitors, liveaboard only, 36 hours offshore. The payoff is underwater encounters that have no equivalent in the Pacific: walls of hammerheads at Dirty Rock and Alcyone, whale sharks on almost every dive, silvertip and Galapagos sharks throughout. A UNESCO World Heritage Site with strict permit limits that keep it genuinely pristine.

Dive centres work out of the Venetian harbour and the Akrotiri peninsula, with walls, caverns and good visibility once the meltemi drops.

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.

The USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier sunk deliberately in 2006, sits in 65 metres with its flight deck at around 43. It is the largest artificial reef in the world and a genuine technical objective.

South coast diving in the deeper, clearer water of the Libyan Sea, with reefs and caverns reachable straight off the beach.