Ambon

Diving here is unglamorous and close to base. Small resorts and centres sit along the bay, the run to most sites is a few minutes in an open boat, and several can be walked into off the beach. Dives are long, slow and shallow, spent hovering over a patch of sand while a guide works the ground ahead of you, and three or four a day, one of them at dusk or after dark, is a normal week without ever leaving the inlet or seeing much reef.

The bottom does the sorting. Ambon Bay is a long inlet that nearly cuts the island in two, and the slopes along its shore at Laha shelve away in fine dark sand and settled debris, where almost everything worth finding is either hiding in the junk or imitating it. That is why the guide matters more than the certification card. Towards the mouth and outside it the water clears, hard coral appears and the terrain turns to slope, wall and rock. The two kinds of diving are a short boat ride apart and feel like different countries.

Finding things is procedural rather than lucky. Guides work known patches, mark animals in the morning and go back to them later, and the same individual rhinopias or frogfish can often be relocated for days on end. That is what makes the place work for photographers: long bottom times in shallow water, subjects that stay put, and nothing to chase. It also means booking one guide for the whole week tends to pay off more than rotating through a centre's roster.

Ambon also doubles as a turnaround port. Banda Sea liveaboards start and finish in the harbour, and their crossing windows, roughly March-April and September-November, fall in the bay's better months, so many divers bolt two or three days of sand diving onto a longer charter. That works well. What does not work is arriving expecting reef: anyone who wants scenery, big animals or clear water will spend the week wondering what they are supposed to be looking at.