Articles > Caribbean Scuba Diving

Corals are so pretty and delicate, it is easy to forget that they are not actually flowers. Pity the poor French scientist, Jean Andre Peyssonel, who in 1726 came up with the outrageous claim that they were animals - and not marine shrubs, as contemporary thought held. He was ridiculed into exile by the Paris Academy of Sciences and lived out the rest of his life on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, dying without recognition of his discovery.

The Caribbean caters well for scuba divers. There are dive-shops on most of the islands and it is perfectly possible to try the sport out for the first time while you are there. You do not need to be trained in advance or to go on a specific scuba diving holiday. With the PADI ‘resort course’ that is available in most islands, it is quite possible to get underwater within a day; it consists of safety instruction and a tester in a pool, followed by a guided open-water dive on the reef.

Scuba diving in the tropics is unimaginably different from diving in the UK. It is less daunting to start with; the sea is warmer and the good visibility brings a certain confidence. It is also a lot more interesting, because the rewards, in the corals and the colourful tropical fish, are more immediate and immeasurably greater.

The established diving destinations in the Caribbean are really the Cayman Islands, which has a justified reputation for well-managed walls (sheer and close to the surface), and Bonaire (a Dutch island off the coast of South America), where the corals that cluster the sloped drop-offs are particularly brightly-coloured. Both have done a good job in managing their reefs and offer a reliable diving package, though Cayman has become almost too popular for its own good and with some companies, you may find yourself one of thirty or forty divers unleashed on the wall at a time.

There are plenty of other impressive places to dive around the islands, though. Two to have gained a reputation recently are Saba in the Leeward Islands and the little known Turks and Caicos Islands. They each benefit from low fishing pressure and from low fresh-water and sediment run-off and this enables the corals to grow in a pristine environment. As they came late on the scene they have been able to set up National Parks before there was any serious damage to the reefs.

The Turks and Caicos Islands, which stand at the south-easterly tip of the Bahamian archipelago, are the heads of huge limestone columns that rise from a 7000ft depth of deep blue ocean, just cutting the water’s surface. Their walls are sheer-sided in places and there are coral outcrops and spur and groove formations (channels of sand in between ridges of coral encrusted rock).

On the reefs you will see whole hemispheres of brain coral, barrel sponges like circus cannon, the tangled, interlocked antlers of staghorn, and leaf-patterned gorgonians, flat like cheese graters, that quiver on the unpredictable current. It always pays to look closer when diving. Individual polyps live in colonies of hundreds like jostling hydras or molar teeth run riot; even encrusting algae contributes to the colourful effect. Anemones snap back into their sheaths if you disturb the water around them.

The fish world is an eternal surprise too. Moray eels shout at you in silent warning from their crevices and rays have been known to turn somersault. To swim in a school of thousands of tiny fish-fry is a wonderful experience: they keep a constant density and direction in the face of the current and as you swim through them they swirl around you like some silken cloud, darting and then settling in perfect unison, responding minutely to your every movement.

The submarine world comes alive if you know what’s going on and so it repays the diligent student who does some reading in advance. Why do thousands of lobsters congregate and gallop head to tail across the seabed of the Bahamas? How did the Monty Python team have a hand in the design of so many fish? And what is a supermale when he’s at home on the reef? There are a few trained marine biologists who run dive schools around the islands and of course a good dive-leader can answer queries. They will know the territory (and point out things you would probably miss) if not all the technical details. It is worth establishing a few symbols before going underwater (cleaning station and mating behaviour are the principal ones).

Saba could not be more different from the Turks and Caicos Islands. In place of the blinding-white sandflats and coral outcrops on submerged columns, Saba is a pyramid-shaped, volcanic lump. It has only one true reef and its sand is mostly grey. Underwater its slopes are irregular, with satellite pinnacles and boulders that lie stacked on one another as they fell, creating caverns, overhangs and an archway. The slopes have become encrusted with elkhorn corals like huge upturned hands and tube sponges erect as exclamation marks.

The fish life in Saba is excellent. Weaving among the corals are schools of twittering sergeant majors (they’re striped and extremely aggressive when guarding their eggs), angelfish in luxurious colours, and parrot fish that nibble at the coral polyps on the reef, crunching it all up, sifting the food they want and then spitting out the remains. They actually create sand by doing this - if you hold your breath on a night dive, you’ll hear them munching away.

On Tent Reef we came across a cleaning station (indicated by the dive-leader by scratching at the fingers of his flat hand). A thick-lipped and grumpy-looking grouper was loitering at an uncomfortable angle just off the rocks while a purple-bodied Pederson’s cleaning shrimp crept around him gingerly, cleaning up his teeth and gills. The shrimp gets a meal in the process of course, but there’s an implicit understanding that the bigger fish will not make a meal of him.

Scuba diving adds an excellent extra facet to the sun, sea and sand of a standard Caribbean visit. Although I do not suppose that poor old Peyssonel was too happy living out his exile there, there are certainly worse places, and at least he had the corals to keep him company.

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