Yap

A Yap dive day is mostly about waiting well. The manta dives are set by the tide rather than by a departure time; you drop into a channel, settle onto sand or rubble a set distance back from the station and stay put. The animals arrive when they arrive. Briefings are firm about not swimming at them and not letting bubbles rise into them, because these are individually catalogued residents and the whole arrangement depends on them not being pushed off their cleaning spots.

The islands sit inside a barrier reef, and the diving divides sharply between the inside and the outside of it. Channel dives are murky by tropical standards, because the tidal water carries the plankton that brings the mantas in at all, and the ground underneath is sand, rubble and scattered coral heads rather than scenery. Outside the reef the water clears and the dive becomes a drift along wall, cuts and overhangs. The channels sit on opposite sides of the island, so wind and tide decide which one gets used.

That makes this a specialist trip rather than a varied one. Divers happy to spend three mornings on the same patch of rubble waiting for the same animals get a great deal out of it, and so do macro photographers, who have the dusk and rubble dives close to town to work with. Sharks here are incidental rather than the draw, and there is no wreck diving to speak of. Reefs and the land above them are held by individual villages, and operators dive by arrangement with them, which is worth knowing ashore too.