About
What Reefwander is
Reefwander is a free guide to scuba diving destinations worldwide: 732 destinations across 15 regions and 4685 named dive sites, each rated month by month so you can pick where to dive by when you can travel. It is written and maintained by hand; nothing on the site is generated on request.
What a guide contains
Every destination page gives the best months to go, typical water temperature, visibility, depth range and current, a difficulty rating with the certification it assumes, how you reach the diving (shore, day boat, liveaboard), the marine life you can expect, and the notable dive sites. Dive site pages go deeper: the site's position and depth profile, a description of the dive itself, hazards to know before you go, wreck facts and history where relevant, and the questions divers most often ask about it.
Season ratings mark each month as peak, good or off-season. Conditions are the typical ranges for the season, drawn from published sources, not live forecasts. Positions are flagged as exact, approximate or unknown, and the map says which; your operator's briefing always has the mooring.
How the guides are researched
Each site is written from published material: dive-operator site briefings, marine-park and government notices, wreck registers and histories, scientific papers and encyclopaedic references. Every dive site page lists the sources it was written from, so you can check a claim or read further. Where sources disagree, the page says so or gives the conservative figure.
Diving conditions change: moorings move, wrecks collapse, parks close sites, and seasons shift. Treat Reefwander as a planning reference, not a briefing. Dive within your certification and experience, and follow your operator's briefing on the day.
Photos, video and map data
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and Openverse under Creative Commons or public-domain licences, and every page credits the photographer and links the licence and the original file. Videos are embedded from their creators' YouTube channels and only load when you press play. Marine-life silhouettes are from PhyloPic.
Some photos are our own. They carry a small Reefwander mark in one corner and are credited “Photo © Reefwander”. They are not openly licensed: all rights are reserved, and we are happy to hear from anyone who would like to use one at contact@reefwander.com.
Map layers are built from open data: seabed depth from NOAA ETOPO 2022 (public domain), coral reef extent from the Allen Coral Atlas (CC BY 4.0), and coastlines and marine protected areas from OpenStreetMap (ODbL).
Independence and funding
Reefwander is an independent project. It is not owned by a dive operator, travel agency, certification body or booking platform, and no destination or dive site is a paid placement. The site is funded by advertising; see the privacy page for what that means for your data.
Corrections, missing places and licensing questions all go through the contact page.