Addu Atoll

Diving Addu is land-based and short-range. The centres sit on the causeway islands - Aquaventure on Maradhoo, Diverland at Equator Village on Gan - and on Herathera, where Diverland and Werner Lau run the school at Canareef. The dhoni leaves from a jetty rather than a mother ship, and Aquaventure runs a two-tank morning and a single tank in the afternoon. The British Loyalty, which the centres call the biggest wreck in the Maldives, is ten to twenty minutes out, the Maa Kandu manta point about thirty, and the far end of the range is the outer reef at the north-west corner, three quarters of an hour away. Because the ring of reef is almost closed, the atoll stays diveable in most weather.

Only four channels break the rim - Kuda Kandu and Maa Kandu in the north, Gan in the south and the broad Villingili channel in the south-east - and they are what the diving is built on. Inside the cuts, sandy slopes run from 5 to 25 m with coral blocks standing on them; at the corners the reef flattens out near 22 m under hard coral fields. Outside, the wall drops from a 5-8 m reef top past 30 m, and off Canareef to 60. The 2016 bleaching damaged the outer reefs between 3 and 12 m; the 1998 event, which hit the rest of the country, is recorded as having spared this atoll.

Addu suits divers who want a fixed base, short boat rides and a wreck, and who would rather dive a manta cleaning station in any month than gamble on a season. Most sites are rated for all levels, so it also works as a place to build hours after a course. It is not the atoll for a shark encounter on every dive - Fuvahmulah, the next island north, has the tiger aggregation - and divers set on covering several atolls in a week are better served by a central-atoll liveaboard.