Saba

Every dive starts at Fort Bay, the island's only harbour, because there is no shore diving anywhere on Saba. Divers come down the switchback road from Windwardside or The Bottom, load onto a boat and run out to the offshore sites, normally two tanks in the morning with an afternoon trip when the sea allows. The scale is small: a handful of operators, few visitors, and site choice made that morning from wind and swell.

The underwater landscape is the volcano's flanks. Close in, the shoreline drops through boulder and black sand onto ledges and walls; the interest is further out, where isolated summits stand in open water with nothing around them. Their tops vary. One exposed rock breaks the surface, while the best-known pinnacles begin nearer twenty-five or thirty metres, so profiles are planned tightly, with a short window on the structure and the rest of the dive spent working back up.

The character comes from being surrounded by open ocean. No shelf slows the water, so current runs across the rock and fish stack up on the up-current side; you go down a line, tuck in behind the structure and watch. The park has been in place since the late 1980s, boats tie to moorings instead of anchoring, and a diver fee is collected through the shops. Conditions swing more than on a sheltered island, and a site that worked one morning can be off the list the next.

It suits divers already comfortable dropping quickly down a line into moving water and holding a stop while the boat waits above. Away from the water the island is quiet in a way some people travel for and others find limiting: no resort strip, no beach to speak of, steep villages pinned to the hillside and the stepped climb up Mount Scenery, the high point of the Dutch kingdom, to fill a surface interval. Groups bringing non-divers or first-timers will find the alternatives narrow.