Shark Hotel

The vertical walls of Northwest Point start shallow, around 11 m in places, and at Shark Hotel the wall begins at about 14 m. Close to the mooring is a huge stand of pillar coral, some of the largest to be seen in the Turks and Caicos, and it is worth giving that the first minutes of the dive rather than dropping straight over the edge and coming back to it later on a thinner gas supply.

Over the lip the wall drops straight down to 24 to 30 m, where a plateau juts out and forms a shelf before plunging into the depths below it. That shelf is the deep leg and it comes first. The sharks the site is named for are small reef sharks, and Northwest Point walls are known for their formations, gold and purple tube sponges among them, so there is something to look at on the face as well as out in the water.

Back on the top of the wall, schools of grunts, snappers and goatfish work the reef, and that shallow ground carries the rest of the dive: ascent, safety stop and the swim back to the mooring line. It is the standard profile on these walls — the deepest thing on the site first, then a long slow return over the reef top, so the ascent absorbs itself instead of being hung in open water off the face.