Kansas Reef

Divers descend to 29 metres (95 feet) onto an expansive sandy bottom alongside a sheer drop-off, with the bommie itself as the reference point in the middle of it. Kansas is small, one coral head rather than a reef system, so the whole dive is worked around it and you move off only as far as the sand and the edge of the wall before coming back.

The coral is what the site is named for: Sinularia soft coral covering the bommie so completely that it looks like wheat fields swaying in the wind when the current moves through it. North Save-a-Tack concentrates schools of big fish, so time here is spent watching the blue as much as the coral - barracuda and trevally in numbers, dogtooth tuna running past, grey reef sharks off the drop-off, grouper on the structure, and scalloped hammerheads reported from the same water.

Namena is dived from a boat working the reserve out in the Koro Sea, usually over more than one day: operators describe the passage as meriting at least two days of diving to appreciate it fully. The current carries divers deeper into the channel, where bommies rise nearly to the surface, so the group goes down together and the bommie is what you hold position against.