Seychelles — Inner Islands

Diving here fits around an island holiday rather than taking it over. Centres sit on the beaches and beside the hotels of north-west Mahe, around Beau Vallon and the Bel Ombre marina, boats are small, and the run out to most sites is short: eight minutes to the Twin Barges, twenty to Baie Ternay. A two-tank morning is the standard offering, with courses and refreshers sharing the boat with certified groups. Briefings deal with navigating between boulders and keeping track of which side of a pinnacle you are on, rather than with timing a channel.

Underwater the granite behaves much as it does on land: rounded boulders the size of houses stacked at odd angles, sand channels running between them, and gaps wide enough to swim through. Growth is sponge, soft coral, gorgonian and algae on bare rock rather than a hard-coral reef, and hard coral cover on the shallow flats varies site to site after the 1998 and 2016 bleaching years. The water is greener and more plankton-rich than the atolls further east, so visibility runs moderate, roughly 10 to 25 m.

Sites sort into three rough groups. Offshore pinnacles rise from deeper water and gather the fish schools and anything passing through. Sheltered boulder reefs closer to the islands are shallow, undemanding and good for turtles and for photography in the light shafts between rocks. The Ennerdale, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker that sank off Mahe in 1970 after striking an uncharted rock, is the one dive with real structure; it was later demolished with explosives as a hazard to shipping, so it lies broken at around 30 m and goes ahead when the sea allows rather than on request.

The calendar matters more than the certification level. The inter-monsoon windows around March and April, then September and October, bring the flattest water and the best visibility, while the southeast trades of June and July push swell onto exposed sites and knock the clarity down, though inshore diving carries on. It suits newly qualified divers, mixed-ability groups and anyone photographing structure and light; divers who measure a trip in sharks and current will find it quiet.