Crocodile Lair

Descend to around 14 metres and move slowly. The site is a gentle sandy slope scattered with small coral bommies and rubble patches, perfect hunting grounds for ambush predators, and everything on it is built to be overlooked. That odd-shaped rock with the whiskered jaw is a crocodilefish, frozen mid-stalk — the well-camouflaged fish, rather than any estuarine reptile, is what the name refers to.

Look closer at the sandy patches and leaf scorpionfish are rocking gently with the surge, their tasselled fins almost indistinguishable from debris; it usually takes a second pass over the same patch before your eye separates them out. Moray eels peer from crevices, blue-spotted stingrays glide just ahead of your fins, and the shallows hold the real prize — several pairs of robust ghost pipefish, often pale pink or yellow, clinging to crinoids.

Night dives here are a different site again: hermit crabs marching across the sand, parrotfish asleep in the bommies and, with luck, the slow deliberate hunt of a Spanish dancer. Nothing about the place rewards speed in daylight or dark — work one patch of bottom at a time rather than trying to cover ground.