Cyclone Reef

The run out is about 15 km southeast of Tufi, past the wartime dive sites, and it happens on the days the sea allows. What waits at the end is not one dive but three: the resort counts three distinct sites on this reef. The wall is the headline of them. It begins at 7 m and drops vertically to beyond 40 m, then slopes away past the limit of visibility, with hard and soft corals and lichens on the face and nudibranchs of every size scattered across it.

The bommie sits off to one side, its far wall perpendicular and cut with swim-throughs and deep caves. Turtles are usually on it and unbothered by divers, tropical reef fish work the coral, and hammerheads occasionally come up out of the deep to look at whoever is there. The top of the bommie is at 5 m, which makes the safety stop a dive in itself; patient searchers sometimes turn up the rare Rhinopias, a scorpionfish relative that sheds its skin every twelve to thirteen weeks.

The outer wall is the long one, sheer and overhung for nearly a kilometre. The way it is dived is to level off at 20-plus metres and run half a tank along it, then come back at a shallower level with air left to spend on the reef top, where hawksbill and green turtles hang about and brain corals reach up to just under the surface. The island above all this was formed from broken coral in the 1972 cyclone and is now a seabird breeding ground.