The Allure of the Bay Islands: Island Hopping in Roatan and Utila
Enjoy idyllic beachside views in Roatan.
When I sit down, I can tell that my dinner companions have seen something spectacular that day: They’re all smiles. It’s Tuesday; a couple of hours earlier my plane touched down on Utila’s airstrip. I've joined a group of divers at Utila Lodge who have been on-island since Saturday.
“You missed a whale shark this morning,” Charles blurts out.
I sigh. My chances of seeing a whale shark off Utila in December are slim; I may have missed my only opportunity.
“We saw one yesterday, too,” he adds. A 51-year-old Texan, Charles is unable to suppress his Rio Grande-size grin.
“Maybe we’ll spot one tomorrow,” Heather says when I groan. “We search for them every morning.”
I’m on a 10-day trip to the Bay Islands, a chain of islands, islets and cays off Honduras’s north coast. The best known ones are Roatan, Utila and Guanaja. The Cayos Cochinos, located closer to the mainland, are not technically part of the Bay Islands, but are often grouped with them in dive guides.
The Bay Islands’ fringing reefs are only about 300 feet offshore, where coral gardens slope down to drop-offs that begin at fairly shallow depths. Off both Roatan and Utila, spur-and-groove formations and fissures in the reef wall provide lots of swim-throughs and narrow valleys for divers to explore. The sparsely populated cays that comprise the Cayos Cochinos, reached only by boat, offer a string of seamounts and a pristine fringing reef. Three-mile-long Utila is where divers come to dive, but when lucky, they also swim with whale sharks.
We don’t know it yet, but my whale shark-happy dinner companions — two sightings in just two days! — won’t swim with another one the rest of the week. I never give up hope, though, scanning the Caribbean during every surface interval. In the end, I’m not disappointed. Before the end of my too-short stay, I discover Utila offers a whole lot more than whale shark encounters.
Utila has fringing reefs and walls on its north and south shores, a string of small cays and submerged seamounts. Off the southern coast, the reefs start in 15 or 20 feet of water and slope away gradually, while the reefs off the north shore drop sharply to more than 1,000 feet. Nearby seamounts rise to within 45 feet of the water’s surface and attract pelagics like schooling jacks and sharks.
On my first day of diving Utila with Bay Islands College of Diving, the water sparkles with early-morning light.
“Good morning, Utila!” Albert shouts as he makes an exuberant giant stride into the water at Don Quickset, off the island’s northwest shore.
Our divemaster’s affection for this site is apparent during the briefing he gives just before we jump in. “I love this site because of the canyons and its ins and outs,” he says in his island lilt. Albert, a native Utilan who has been a divemaster for six years, is happiest when he’s wet.
He quickly ducks under water, leading us to the canyons and fissures that split the reef face. There’s something to see at every turn in this network of passageways: a longspine squirrelfish napping in a bowl-like depression atop a coral head, an encrusted channel-clinging crab matching its rocky nook, a pair of elegant French angelfish gliding past my faceplate. When we surface, we’ve caught Albert’s enthusiasm for this labyrinthine location.
The boat noses into a slightly choppy sea on its way to Little Bight, west of Laguna Beach on Utila’s south side. This gently sloping wall is decorated with delicate bunches of translucent bluebell tunicates and black coral. Intent on looking for crabs and lobsters tucked into the wall’s nooks and crannies, we’ve got our backs to the open water when Albert raps his tank sharply. We follow his pointed finger to see a good-size spotted eagle ray swooping past.
The next day, Albert plans a three-tank dive day and lunch on Pigeon Cay, off Utila’s southwestern end. We make our first dive on Great Wall in Turtle Harbour, a marine reserve and wildlife refuge in the heart of Utila’s north side.
“There used to be a tasty meal called turtle,” Albert says, pointing to the bay’s sandy beach, a perfect nesting habitat for sea turtles. “But because it was so tasty, you won’t find many turtles here.”
In fact, we don’t see any, even though the bay is now off-limits to turtle poachers. But the breathtaking wall here, a riot of color and texture, is stuffed with huge barrel sponges, sea feather plumes and common sea fans. Azure vase sponges pop out at odd angles. Flitting around coral heads are bright yellow spotfin butterflyfish and small schools of blue tangs.
On our second dive, we drop down the wall at Spotted Bay, west of Turtle Harbour. Thickets of rope and stovepipe sponges sprout in healthy clusters on the wall’s face. At the reeftop we find an assortment of reef fish — stoplight parrots, queen angels, blue tangs.
After a lunch of fish cakes at Nancy’s Restaurant on Pigeon Cay — actually two tiny cays, Pigeon and Suc-Suc, joined by a small wooden bridge — we make the day’s final dive at Resort Reef, on Utila’s south side. Most of us stay shallow, content to swim along a light-soaked fissure in the reef, its sides adorned with sponges, sea fans, and stacked piles of plate and sheet corals. We’re both happy and tired when we tie up to the dock. Not counting the stop on Pigeon Cay, we’ve been on the boat for seven hours, some of it spent looking for whale sharks — with no luck.
Even though I’ve come to Utila in hopes of swimming with a whale shark, I find the diving here spectacular and diverse: dramatic dropoffs and gently sloping walls, open-ocean seamounts and sandy cays, sun-dappled coral gardens and fish-filled valleys cut into the reef.
On my last morning on Utila, Heather and I kayak the inner perimeter of East Harbour. The water is calm and we paddle easily from Utila Lodge to a mangrove-lined inlet on the east end of the bay. We don’t have enough time to explore the inlet; reluctantly, we turn the kayaks around. Our flight to Roatan, where I’m spending the next four days, departs in about an hour.
The Bay Island Switch
The largest of the Bay Islands, 40-mile-long Roatan offers a tourism infrastructure — like an international airport — not found on Utila. Its coastline is lined with luxury homes and all-inclusive resorts, and there are a number of places on the island where divers can spend their surface intervals.
French Harbour is a picturesque fishing community that is home to Gio’s and its legendary lobster dinners. Sandy Bay offer the Roatan Museum and the dolphin program at the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences at Anthony’s Key Resort. West End, a funky seaside village, is where tourists gather to eat, drink, shop and absorb the local culture.
Because of Roatan’s size, dive operators generally make boat dives on their respective sides of the island. The fringing reef off the north coast starts shallow, in about 20 feet of water, and slopes off to the drop-off, which begins at about 40 feet. On the south side, the vertical wall is even closer to shore and drops off sharply from only 25 feet of water. A number of popular wall dives are clustered along the island’s western end in Roatan’s Sandy Bay-West End Marine Park, where commercial fishing, lobstering and conch collecting are prohibited.
My first dive is on the wreck of the Prince Albert, a 140-foot interisland freighter in 65 to 85 feet of water. I’m with a group making a shore dive off CoCo View Resort as an orientation to the collection of sites called Front Yard. A chain on the channel’s bottom takes divers to the Prince Albert. A cable leads to the remains of a DC-3 airplane fuselage. The channel is a wide cut in the wall; to the east is CoCo View Wall, to the west is Newman’s.
The next day, the dive boat I’m assigned to sets off for Carib Point on the island’s south side. When we arrive, Jessi, our divemaster, finds the mooring has broken. I’ve been grouped with five Roatan veterans, Southern Californians who dive Roatan twice a year. They convince Jessi to head farther east to Calvin’s Crack. I’m ecstatic. I’ve heard that this dive is every bit as spectacular as Roatan’s signature dive, Mary’s Place, which is closed at the time of my trip, to help it recover from diver pressure.
From the base of the mooring at 20 feet, the group descends single file into the crack. Rob, one of the Roatan faithful who has dived here so many times that he can deliver a detailed briefing, leads the group to where the fissure opens to blue water at 70 feet on the wall; Jessi shadows the group at the top of the crack. Lots of red-orange and azure vase sponges adorn the wall, and tiny Christmas tree worms, colorful as pansy petals, cling to the tops of coral heads. Lita, an observant underwater photographer, gets a terrific shot of a five-inch bearded fireworm, its segmented, bristly body curled atop a finger of coral.
At the end of the dive, we surface to an ocean-dimpling rain shower. As the rain worsens, we huddle together under the boat’s canopy, and once we tie up, quickly scatter to our rooms to grab hot showers. By noon, the sky and water are the color of tarnished silver, though by the time our boat departs for our afternoon dive, the rain lets up. We head to Forty-foot Point, on Roatan’s south-central coast.
This dive delivers on hidden surprises: a goby perched in a sponge, three green moray eels, one as thick as my upper arm, a soda-straw-thin trumpetfish hovering under a ledge.
The next morning, the sky spits chilly rain, but by the time we gear up for the afternoon dive at Ironshore, sunlight slants through the clouds and tatters of blue sky lighten the horizon. The wall at Ironshore curves downward, forming substantial ledges. Schools of fish gather here, including smallmouth grunts and yellowtail goatfish. Turning back toward the boat, we face an unexpected and feisty current. We kick hard; dropping a few feet makes finning easier. Finally, we make it back at the mooring, where the shallow sand bottom is punctuated by large coral mounds, some reaching within five feet of the surface.
On my last full day on Roatan, Gael, a retired veterinarian from Virginia, and I make a trip to Carambola Botanical Gardens, located across the road from the entrance to Anthony’s Key Resort on Sandy Bay. Carambola has two trails. The “jungle hike” loops past orchids, mahogany trees, yellow butterflies and, of course, carambola trees, which produce star fruits. The “mountain hike” is a little longer and steeper, but is still an easy ascent to the top of Carambola Mountain, which is really a large hill. The climb pays off with a panoramic vista of the Caribbean, including a parrot’s-eye view of leaping dolphins in the ocean enclosure at Anthony’s Key.
Saying Goodbye
The next morning I’m wedged into a twin-prop plane as it shoulders its way through open blue sky and cottony clouds, across the Caribbean to the mainland, the first leg of my trip home. Below us the purplish-blue Caribbean looks wrinkled, like an immense sheet of cellophane. I can’t resist scanning the water, looking for diving seabirds hitting baitfish chased to the water’s surface by a whale shark. It’s possible, I think, but then realize that whale sharks or not, I’ve had a remarkable week of diving. And I know I’ll return to these captivating islands.
For now, I’m headed home.
The Bay Islands: A Dive Site Sampler
ROATAN
North Side
Odyssey: The massive 300-foot Odyssey was put down in late 2002 in 120 feet of water. The mast reaches to within 40 feet of the surface; the top of the bow is at 70 feet. The wreck’s size and the barracuda and jacks patrolling it are enough to thrill divers.
Spooky Channel: Just east of the Bay Islands Beach Resort, the channel is hollowed out of the reef, its bottom at 95 feet, making for an eerie dive.
West End
West End Wall: Just off West Bay Beach, this steep drop-off provides lots of drama for drift divers. The wall is a magnet for tarpon and jacks.
Herbie’s Place: This site, located off Roatan’s western tip, features deep cuts in the wall.
South Side
Mary’s Place: Roatan’s signature dive is a sheer vertical fissure cut deep into the wall. Divers follow the swim-through back to the coral- and sponge-encrusted wall. Black coral lines the wall at deeper depths. Sometimes closed (as it was when I visited) to relieve diver pressure.
Forty-foot Point: Schooling fish are found near the surface in the sand channel that flanks this site. The deep, steep wall turns north, catching an upwelling that feeds deep-water gorgonians.
Front Yard, Newman Wall and Coco View Wall: The 140-foot, sponge-coated Prince Albert and the remains of a DC-3 airplane fuselage are in the sand channel in front of Coco View Resort in about 85 feet of water. The channel splits the steep wall in two.
Ironshore: Coral mounds reach within five to 10 feet of the surface, while the reef curves downward, forming a ledge at about 60 feet that marks the beginning of the drop-off.
Calvin’s Crack: A tunnel-like crack in the wall — similar to Mary's Place — leads to an opening at about 70 feet. Stunning.
UTILA
North Side
Jack’s Bight: This site features a maze of cracks in the reef. The formations provide sheltered areas for juveniles to set up cleaning stations.
The Great Wall: A spectacular wall dive off Turtle Harbour. Huge barrel sponges and sea fans thrive here.
West End
Don Quickset: Two canyons split the reef; bring a dive light to find crabs and lobsters in the crevices.
Spotted Bay: This sponge- and coral-adorned reef drops off sharply. After diving here, boat captains often search for whale sharks.
South Side
Little Bight: Examine reef crevices and overhangs for lobsters, crabs and squirrelfish on this gradual slope.
Resort Reef: Located opposite Deep Blue Dive Resort, this site features mounds of coral — boulder, brain, leaf, plate and sheet — and stands of branching and pillar corals.
Rocky Point: Bright juveniles like yellowtail damsels and bluehead wrasses flit about the shallow reeftop.
East End
Black Hills: A seamount that rises from the ocean bottom at 130 feet, the pinnacle is swarmed by schools of fish, including jacks and chub.
CAYOS COCHINOS
Pelican Point Wall (West End, Cochino Grande): A terraced wall with grottoes and cracks, schooling fish and colorful tropicals.
Jena’s Cove (North Side, Cochino Pequeño): A sloping wall drops to the bottom at about 70 feet where vertical pillars form a maze filled with vast shoals of fish.
Enjoy idyllic beachside views in Roatan.
When I sit down, I can tell that my dinner companions have seen something spectacular that day: They’re all smiles. It’s Tuesday; a couple of hours earlier my plane touched down on Utila’s airstrip. I've joined a group of divers at Utila Lodge who have been on-island since Saturday.
“You missed a whale shark this morning,” Charles blurts out.
I sigh. My chances of seeing a whale shark off Utila in December are slim; I may have missed my only opportunity.
“We saw one yesterday, too,” he adds. A 51-year-old Texan, Charles is unable to suppress his Rio Grande-size grin.
“Maybe we’ll spot one tomorrow,” Heather says when I groan. “We search for them every morning.”
I’m on a 10-day trip to the Bay Islands, a chain of islands, islets and cays off Honduras’s north coast. The best known ones are Roatan, Utila and Guanaja. The Cayos Cochinos, located closer to the mainland, are not technically part of the Bay Islands, but are often grouped with them in dive guides.
The Bay Islands’ fringing reefs are only about 300 feet offshore, where coral gardens slope down to drop-offs that begin at fairly shallow depths. Off both Roatan and Utila, spur-and-groove formations and fissures in the reef wall provide lots of swim-throughs and narrow valleys for divers to explore. The sparsely populated cays that comprise the Cayos Cochinos, reached only by boat, offer a string of seamounts and a pristine fringing reef. Three-mile-long Utila is where divers come to dive, but when lucky, they also swim with whale sharks.
We don’t know it yet, but my whale shark-happy dinner companions — two sightings in just two days! — won’t swim with another one the rest of the week. I never give up hope, though, scanning the Caribbean during every surface interval. In the end, I’m not disappointed. Before the end of my too-short stay, I discover Utila offers a whole lot more than whale shark encounters.
Utila has fringing reefs and walls on its north and south shores, a string of small cays and submerged seamounts. Off the southern coast, the reefs start in 15 or 20 feet of water and slope away gradually, while the reefs off the north shore drop sharply to more than 1,000 feet. Nearby seamounts rise to within 45 feet of the water’s surface and attract pelagics like schooling jacks and sharks.
On my first day of diving Utila with Bay Islands College of Diving, the water sparkles with early-morning light.
“Good morning, Utila!” Albert shouts as he makes an exuberant giant stride into the water at Don Quickset, off the island’s northwest shore.
Our divemaster’s affection for this site is apparent during the briefing he gives just before we jump in. “I love this site because of the canyons and its ins and outs,” he says in his island lilt. Albert, a native Utilan who has been a divemaster for six years, is happiest when he’s wet.
He quickly ducks under water, leading us to the canyons and fissures that split the reef face. There’s something to see at every turn in this network of passageways: a longspine squirrelfish napping in a bowl-like depression atop a coral head, an encrusted channel-clinging crab matching its rocky nook, a pair of elegant French angelfish gliding past my faceplate. When we surface, we’ve caught Albert’s enthusiasm for this labyrinthine location.
The boat noses into a slightly choppy sea on its way to Little Bight, west of Laguna Beach on Utila’s south side. This gently sloping wall is decorated with delicate bunches of translucent bluebell tunicates and black coral. Intent on looking for crabs and lobsters tucked into the wall’s nooks and crannies, we’ve got our backs to the open water when Albert raps his tank sharply. We follow his pointed finger to see a good-size spotted eagle ray swooping past.
The next day, Albert plans a three-tank dive day and lunch on Pigeon Cay, off Utila’s southwestern end. We make our first dive on Great Wall in Turtle Harbour, a marine reserve and wildlife refuge in the heart of Utila’s north side.
“There used to be a tasty meal called turtle,” Albert says, pointing to the bay’s sandy beach, a perfect nesting habitat for sea turtles. “But because it was so tasty, you won’t find many turtles here.”
In fact, we don’t see any, even though the bay is now off-limits to turtle poachers. But the breathtaking wall here, a riot of color and texture, is stuffed with huge barrel sponges, sea feather plumes and common sea fans. Azure vase sponges pop out at odd angles. Flitting around coral heads are bright yellow spotfin butterflyfish and small schools of blue tangs.
On our second dive, we drop down the wall at Spotted Bay, west of Turtle Harbour. Thickets of rope and stovepipe sponges sprout in healthy clusters on the wall’s face. At the reeftop we find an assortment of reef fish — stoplight parrots, queen angels, blue tangs.
After a lunch of fish cakes at Nancy’s Restaurant on Pigeon Cay — actually two tiny cays, Pigeon and Suc-Suc, joined by a small wooden bridge — we make the day’s final dive at Resort Reef, on Utila’s south side. Most of us stay shallow, content to swim along a light-soaked fissure in the reef, its sides adorned with sponges, sea fans, and stacked piles of plate and sheet corals. We’re both happy and tired when we tie up to the dock. Not counting the stop on Pigeon Cay, we’ve been on the boat for seven hours, some of it spent looking for whale sharks — with no luck.
Even though I’ve come to Utila in hopes of swimming with a whale shark, I find the diving here spectacular and diverse: dramatic dropoffs and gently sloping walls, open-ocean seamounts and sandy cays, sun-dappled coral gardens and fish-filled valleys cut into the reef.
On my last morning on Utila, Heather and I kayak the inner perimeter of East Harbour. The water is calm and we paddle easily from Utila Lodge to a mangrove-lined inlet on the east end of the bay. We don’t have enough time to explore the inlet; reluctantly, we turn the kayaks around. Our flight to Roatan, where I’m spending the next four days, departs in about an hour.
The Bay Island Switch
The largest of the Bay Islands, 40-mile-long Roatan offers a tourism infrastructure — like an international airport — not found on Utila. Its coastline is lined with luxury homes and all-inclusive resorts, and there are a number of places on the island where divers can spend their surface intervals.
French Harbour is a picturesque fishing community that is home to Gio’s and its legendary lobster dinners. Sandy Bay offer the Roatan Museum and the dolphin program at the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences at Anthony’s Key Resort. West End, a funky seaside village, is where tourists gather to eat, drink, shop and absorb the local culture.
Because of Roatan’s size, dive operators generally make boat dives on their respective sides of the island. The fringing reef off the north coast starts shallow, in about 20 feet of water, and slopes off to the drop-off, which begins at about 40 feet. On the south side, the vertical wall is even closer to shore and drops off sharply from only 25 feet of water. A number of popular wall dives are clustered along the island’s western end in Roatan’s Sandy Bay-West End Marine Park, where commercial fishing, lobstering and conch collecting are prohibited.
My first dive is on the wreck of the Prince Albert, a 140-foot interisland freighter in 65 to 85 feet of water. I’m with a group making a shore dive off CoCo View Resort as an orientation to the collection of sites called Front Yard. A chain on the channel’s bottom takes divers to the Prince Albert. A cable leads to the remains of a DC-3 airplane fuselage. The channel is a wide cut in the wall; to the east is CoCo View Wall, to the west is Newman’s.
The next day, the dive boat I’m assigned to sets off for Carib Point on the island’s south side. When we arrive, Jessi, our divemaster, finds the mooring has broken. I’ve been grouped with five Roatan veterans, Southern Californians who dive Roatan twice a year. They convince Jessi to head farther east to Calvin’s Crack. I’m ecstatic. I’ve heard that this dive is every bit as spectacular as Roatan’s signature dive, Mary’s Place, which is closed at the time of my trip, to help it recover from diver pressure.
From the base of the mooring at 20 feet, the group descends single file into the crack. Rob, one of the Roatan faithful who has dived here so many times that he can deliver a detailed briefing, leads the group to where the fissure opens to blue water at 70 feet on the wall; Jessi shadows the group at the top of the crack. Lots of red-orange and azure vase sponges adorn the wall, and tiny Christmas tree worms, colorful as pansy petals, cling to the tops of coral heads. Lita, an observant underwater photographer, gets a terrific shot of a five-inch bearded fireworm, its segmented, bristly body curled atop a finger of coral.
At the end of the dive, we surface to an ocean-dimpling rain shower. As the rain worsens, we huddle together under the boat’s canopy, and once we tie up, quickly scatter to our rooms to grab hot showers. By noon, the sky and water are the color of tarnished silver, though by the time our boat departs for our afternoon dive, the rain lets up. We head to Forty-foot Point, on Roatan’s south-central coast.
This dive delivers on hidden surprises: a goby perched in a sponge, three green moray eels, one as thick as my upper arm, a soda-straw-thin trumpetfish hovering under a ledge.
The next morning, the sky spits chilly rain, but by the time we gear up for the afternoon dive at Ironshore, sunlight slants through the clouds and tatters of blue sky lighten the horizon. The wall at Ironshore curves downward, forming substantial ledges. Schools of fish gather here, including smallmouth grunts and yellowtail goatfish. Turning back toward the boat, we face an unexpected and feisty current. We kick hard; dropping a few feet makes finning easier. Finally, we make it back at the mooring, where the shallow sand bottom is punctuated by large coral mounds, some reaching within five feet of the surface.
On my last full day on Roatan, Gael, a retired veterinarian from Virginia, and I make a trip to Carambola Botanical Gardens, located across the road from the entrance to Anthony’s Key Resort on Sandy Bay. Carambola has two trails. The “jungle hike” loops past orchids, mahogany trees, yellow butterflies and, of course, carambola trees, which produce star fruits. The “mountain hike” is a little longer and steeper, but is still an easy ascent to the top of Carambola Mountain, which is really a large hill. The climb pays off with a panoramic vista of the Caribbean, including a parrot’s-eye view of leaping dolphins in the ocean enclosure at Anthony’s Key.
Saying Goodbye
The next morning I’m wedged into a twin-prop plane as it shoulders its way through open blue sky and cottony clouds, across the Caribbean to the mainland, the first leg of my trip home. Below us the purplish-blue Caribbean looks wrinkled, like an immense sheet of cellophane. I can’t resist scanning the water, looking for diving seabirds hitting baitfish chased to the water’s surface by a whale shark. It’s possible, I think, but then realize that whale sharks or not, I’ve had a remarkable week of diving. And I know I’ll return to these captivating islands.
For now, I’m headed home.
The Bay Islands: A Dive Site Sampler
ROATAN
North Side
Odyssey: The massive 300-foot Odyssey was put down in late 2002 in 120 feet of water. The mast reaches to within 40 feet of the surface; the top of the bow is at 70 feet. The wreck’s size and the barracuda and jacks patrolling it are enough to thrill divers.
Spooky Channel: Just east of the Bay Islands Beach Resort, the channel is hollowed out of the reef, its bottom at 95 feet, making for an eerie dive.
West End
West End Wall: Just off West Bay Beach, this steep drop-off provides lots of drama for drift divers. The wall is a magnet for tarpon and jacks.
Herbie’s Place: This site, located off Roatan’s western tip, features deep cuts in the wall.
South Side
Mary’s Place: Roatan’s signature dive is a sheer vertical fissure cut deep into the wall. Divers follow the swim-through back to the coral- and sponge-encrusted wall. Black coral lines the wall at deeper depths. Sometimes closed (as it was when I visited) to relieve diver pressure.
Forty-foot Point: Schooling fish are found near the surface in the sand channel that flanks this site. The deep, steep wall turns north, catching an upwelling that feeds deep-water gorgonians.
Front Yard, Newman Wall and Coco View Wall: The 140-foot, sponge-coated Prince Albert and the remains of a DC-3 airplane fuselage are in the sand channel in front of Coco View Resort in about 85 feet of water. The channel splits the steep wall in two.
Ironshore: Coral mounds reach within five to 10 feet of the surface, while the reef curves downward, forming a ledge at about 60 feet that marks the beginning of the drop-off.
Calvin’s Crack: A tunnel-like crack in the wall — similar to Mary's Place — leads to an opening at about 70 feet. Stunning.
UTILA
North Side
Jack’s Bight: This site features a maze of cracks in the reef. The formations provide sheltered areas for juveniles to set up cleaning stations.
The Great Wall: A spectacular wall dive off Turtle Harbour. Huge barrel sponges and sea fans thrive here.
West End
Don Quickset: Two canyons split the reef; bring a dive light to find crabs and lobsters in the crevices.
Spotted Bay: This sponge- and coral-adorned reef drops off sharply. After diving here, boat captains often search for whale sharks.
South Side
Little Bight: Examine reef crevices and overhangs for lobsters, crabs and squirrelfish on this gradual slope.
Resort Reef: Located opposite Deep Blue Dive Resort, this site features mounds of coral — boulder, brain, leaf, plate and sheet — and stands of branching and pillar corals.
Rocky Point: Bright juveniles like yellowtail damsels and bluehead wrasses flit about the shallow reeftop.
East End
Black Hills: A seamount that rises from the ocean bottom at 130 feet, the pinnacle is swarmed by schools of fish, including jacks and chub.
CAYOS COCHINOS
Pelican Point Wall (West End, Cochino Grande): A terraced wall with grottoes and cracks, schooling fish and colorful tropicals.
Jena’s Cove (North Side, Cochino Pequeño): A sloping wall drops to the bottom at about 70 feet where vertical pillars form a maze filled with vast shoals of fish.
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