Okinawa — Cape Maeda & Sunabe

Diving the main island is a road-trip affair. Shops run minibuses out of Onna and Chatan, and the same site can be dived from shore or off a small boat from a nearby fishing port, which is how operators dodge the worst of the queues. Cape Maeda is best taken early on a weekday, before the tour groups fill the stairway down the cliff. Sunabe works on the opposite logic: parking runs the length of the wall, ladders drop straight in, and divers come and go from dawn until well after dark.

The west coast is raised Ryukyu limestone, and the shoreline carries on underwater as undercuts, cracks and overhangs rather than as reef proper. Maeda is a headland with a shallow shelf that ends in a drop-off, and the cavern is one doorway in that structure rather than the whole of it. Sunabe is the built version of the same idea: seawall rubble, tetrapods and scattered bommies on a gentle slope, and it is exactly that broken ground that makes it hold so much small life.

The range of a single week is the real argument for the island. A cavern in the morning, a slow macro crawl at the seawall in the afternoon and a night dive on the same entry add up to a varied log without chartering anything, while Horseshoe and Onna Point fill the gaps when wind shuts one stretch of coast. The destroyer off Kouri is the exception: struck by kamikaze aircraft in April 1945 and scuttled by American gunfire the following day, it is a dedicated deep charter from the north of the island, booked separately and usually run as a single short dive.

It suits first-timers, families and photographers better than reef purists. Rental gear is everywhere, shops are used to overseas divers, and short drives make it easy to fit diving around a normal holiday; the shallow, low-current sites also forgive anyone coming back after a long lay-off. Divers chasing dense coral or bigger animals will do better on the outer islands, and July through September needs slack in the schedule, since typhoons can shut boats down for days at a stretch.