Casino Point Dive Park

The entry is the reason people keep coming back. Concrete steps run down at the point beside the Casino building, so divers and snorkellers step down a few steps and walk in rather than negotiating a surf-washed beach. An air refill station and a tank and weight rental counter sit within a few paces of the water, so repeating the dive costs nothing more than a walk back up the steps. The point faces north, which is why it stays mostly protected from the heavy surf and waves for most of the year.

Swim out from the steps and the kelp closes overhead. The park is a protected area and nothing can be removed from it, and the common sightings show it: garibaldi over the rock, kelp bass among the stipes, moray eels in the ledges and lobsters backed into the cracks. Octopus and horn sharks reward a slow pass rather than a fast swim, and bat rays and the occasional giant black sea bass come through over the reef.

There is structure as well as kelp. A shipwreck in the park starts at 60 ft (18 m), and the Su-Jac lies just off Casino Point among other wrecks in the island's waters, so the deeper end of the dive is metal rather than canopy. Everything is reached from the same steps and finished at them, so there is no boat, no crossing and no open-water swim at the end of it.