Man O' War Shoals

The shoals sit at the northwest corner of the island, where the Torrens Point headland carries on under water as a run of submerged and semi-submerged rock. Nothing on it goes below 25 m, so this is one of the shallower dives on Saba, and the profile is not the tight deep-then-up plan the offshore pinnacles demand. There is time to work along the rock rather than race the computer back up.

You drop on a mooring and follow the rock. Walls and boulders are covered in sponges, smaller corals and sea fans, and black durgons and barracuda school around the mooring lines themselves, so the fish start before you have left the descent. Blacktip sharks show as shapes out in the blue rather than close passes, and stingrays sit on the grey sand between the rock.

Diamond Rock stands a little further out, the semi-submerged spire the park pairs with the shoals as the other extension of the same headland and likewise capped at 25 m; the park warns of strong currents there, worth knowing since the two sit in the same corner of the marine park. Inshore, the spires at Wells Bay and Torrens Point close off a sheltered cove with underwater caves and tunnels.