Pulau Hantu & Singapore's Southern Islands

Every dive here starts with a boat ride from the main island. Weekend boats leave West Coast or the Marina at Keppel Bay, and the crossing to Pulau Hantu, 13 km (8 mi) off the south coast, takes about 45 minutes. Trips run every weekend, morning and afternoon. Sites are picked from the weather and the tidal flow, and the boats steer clear of spots with strong current.

Coral reefs lie outside Hantu's sea wall and are more extensive around Hantu Besar than Hantu Kecil. Hard and soft corals, sponges, sea fans and anemones cover them, and mushroom corals are particularly abundant around Hantu. The draw is small: clownfish, seahorses, honeyhead damselfish, shrimps, crabs and a wide spread of nudibranchs, with batfish and giant clams among them. Giant pufferfish, nurse sharks and hawksbill turtles turn up now and then.

Visibility is the price of diving beside the largest port in Asia. Ship traffic and commercial fishing keep the water churned, so 2 to 3 m is the usual view and 4 to 8 m a good day. On Hantu, the two inlets can be crossed on foot at low tide, but the area should not be dived at high tide, when a diver can be stranded on the wrong side. Pulau Jong, a tiny island of cliffs with no landing jetty and no scheduled ferries, has a healthy fringing reef and strong currents.

Hantu suits trainees and newer divers: Singapore's dive shops run the Open Water course there, and morning departures let an instructor fit the training dives into the day. Pulau Jong is the next step, a popular site for the Advanced Open Water course and reached only on dive-shop trips. Divers who love macro do well on both islands. Divers who come for clear water will be disappointed more often than not, since visibility reaches 10 m only in certain months of the year.