St John's Reefs

A day here belongs to the boat. Southern itineraries run about a week, and once the long overnight steam south is behind you the schedule settles into three or four dives a day, with the tenders doing most of the work: a zodiac carries divers out to a pinnacle, drops them upcurrent and collects them wherever they surface. Boats lie overnight in the lee of the reef blocks, so a guide can swap an exposed outer site for a sheltered inner one within the same morning if the wind gets up.

The two reef forms dive nothing alike. On a habili there is no reference beyond the pinnacle itself: you drop onto the top, work around it against whatever the current is doing, and spend as much of the dive facing open water as facing coral. The gotas are the opposite, big enough to put the reef between you and the weather, and their tunnels and cave mouths stay inside the daylight zone rather than being true cave, so they are guide-led, single-file swims where buoyancy matters more than depth. Most itineraries alternate the two.

What divers talk about afterwards is the hard coral. Table and fire coral run right up over the shallows, and the structure is unbroken enough that the small fish depending on it are there in proportion; the sites up north, worked by day boats for forty years, rarely show that. The other difference is distance. Grey reefs here will often come in for a look rather than holding as silhouettes, and the safety stop after a habili dive, hung in open water with nothing beneath you, is usually what people describe first.

It suits divers who have already done the northern wrecks and want the opposite kind of trip. In practice that means conservative profiles because the week offers no bailout to shore, carrying your own SMB and a spare, and accepting that a briefing can change at anchor when the wind does. Photographers do well if they can work wide in blue water and in the low, angled light inside the gotas. Divers still early in their logbook, or prone to seasickness on a long crossing, get more out of the reefs closer to shore further north.