Cristóbal Colón

The site lies eight miles north of the island, on the reef just east of North Rock, and it is a long way from being a single hull. The Colón hit the reef and broke across it, so half the wreckage sits on one side and half on the other, covering something like 100,000 square feet. Depths run from 4.6 m on the shallow side down to 18.3 m at the deepest part of the field.

British and American forces used the remains as a practice-bombing target during the Second World War, which is why the structure is broken down rather than standing. The dive is a swim across plating and machinery scattered over reef and sand, with nothing on the site deeper than 18.3 m. With wreckage spread over roughly 100,000 square feet, one dive covers a section of the field rather than the whole of it.

Soft and hard corals have taken over the wreckage, and the fish life is the reef's as much as the wreck's: colourful reef fish across the plating, large groupers holding in the shade of it, barracuda above, and the occasional sea turtle passing through. Nobody was lost when she went aground, so nothing about the site reads as a grave — it is a reef with a liner in it.