Welcome Jetty

Everything starts at the dive jetty. Directly below the pier is a cave of flashing scallops, and from there the reef falls away to the base of Shark Bombie in just over 30 m. Working back up is where the time goes: hunt for a pygmy seahorse if you have the gas, spotlight a colourful cave on the way, and finish on a 15 m wall clustered with fans. The jetty itself always has dense schools of smaller fish and is home to a garden of tridacna giant clams.

The residents make it. Mangrove jack and greasy rockcods hold station and stingrays rest on the sand, all under continual surveillance by the resident grey whalers, whitetips and blacktips — sharks are a normal part of a shore dive here rather than an event. The same wall is the resort's easy-entry night dive, the one it puts inexperienced night divers on: sponge decorator crabs, hingeback shrimp, spindle cowries, basket stars, hawkfish and slipper lobsters are common sightings after dark.

The same entry serves a deeper profile the resort calls B.O.T.C.H., the Bottom of the Channel. You enter at the dive jetty and descend to around 30 m on the wall, then head out into the passage, where an underwater sand dune rises about 2 m off the bottom and runs along the channel on the current line to the Deep Bombies at a maximum of around 40 m. Thousands of garden eels wave in the current down there, blue-spotted reef rays and bull rays glide over the sand, and visibility at the bottom is often in excess of 40 m. You finish back on the wall, drifting either to Inside Point or the jetty depending on which way the current runs.