Tiger Beach

The dive starts before you are in the water. A feeder, one of the dive guides, goes in alone to set the bait on the sand, and only then do divers follow, dropping onto a bottom 8 to 10 m down and settling into rows with the chum slick running away down current. There is no reef and no wreck to work along; the sand is the whole stage, and you stay on it, kneeling, for most of the dive.

Lemon sharks arrive early and stay: 20 to 30 of them are almost always present, cruising over the sand and between the rows. The tigers come and go through the session, large females reported at 4.5 m and up to 5.5 m, and they pass close enough that handling them uncaged has become a routine part of the operation here. Caribbean reef sharks, nurse sharks and bull sharks work the same water, groupers and snappers are part of the scene, and great hammerheads are added to the cast between December and March.

Currents can run moderate even when the surface is calm, so the line is set with the slick drifting away from the divers rather than across them, and you hold position instead of swimming. Visibility around 30 m over the sand makes this a dive built for wide-angle photography, and with the deepest part of the site at 20 m the limits are bottom time and composure rather than depth. Atlantic spotted dolphins turn up over the bank in the summer months.