With marine reserves, accessible coastlines, and numerous islands, New Zealand’s underwater world is a diver’s paradise.
Dive Locations
See the sea alongside seven species of sea turtles at these tropical dive destinations. Have you had an amazing turtle diving experience? Share it with us.
Probably the diving world’s most famous shipwreck, the SS Thistlegorm was a World War II British military transport that sank while anchored just south of the Gulf of Suez.
One of Egypt’s more remote dive sites, Brothers Islands boasts pristine corals, large pelagic life, and two wrecks: not bad for two islands that aren’t much larger than a football field each.
On the east side of Bali, Indonesia, Tulamben offers lush rainforest, beautiful Balinese villages, and one of the largest wrecks accessible to snorkelers and divers.
Offering some of the region’s best wall diving, as well as seasonal sightings of most of the sharks spotted in the Red Sea, this reef should be on every diver’s bucket list.
A cleaning station in Maa Kandu, Manta Point offers an incoming current in the morning, making it a reliable spot to see reef mantas for a couple of hours a day.
The home of the brave is also home to adventurous divers looking for warm and cold water diving destinations. Here are six amazing U.S. dive sites.
Some sunk, some are man-made—all of these wrecks are beautiful sights to behold for snorkelers and divers alike.
Scuttled off the coast of Malta to benefit local marine life and scuba divers in 2007, the wreck is one of Malta’s newest, and is therefore in excellent condition.
Among the location’s residents are wobbegong sharks, Port Jackson sharks, and blue-ringed octopus, the latter typically seen in the center of the little cove that is formed by the rocks shielding the beach from the rest of the peninsula.
Hiding in the sea grass just offshore are this site’s real attractions: the local population of green sea turtles and the resident dugong, nicknamed Dennis.
Many divers may wonder what’s so appealing about a cold-water lake in the middle of the wind-swept North Atlantic. The two main draws are the visibility and the geology, which is unlike that any other dive site. You’ll never think of great visibility the same once you’ve dived Silfra.
They’re the second largest fish in the sea, and equally as impressive as their more famous cousins, whale sharks. And yet, basking sharks remain something of a mystery, an oddity that most people will only ever see on television, if at all.
When the valley was flooded to create the lake, the factory remained above the water line, but the mills assumed new identities as complex, submerged ruins, ideally suited to scuba exploration.
Dahab offers easy shore diving, with plentiful coral and fish life within a few breaths of your descent, but also provides sufficient depths for all levels.
Protea Banks is famous for tiger and bull sharks, but depending on your luck and the season, you may also spot great whites, threshers, copper sharks, duskies, sandbar sharks, guitar sharks, oceanic blacktips and shoals of schooling hammerheads.
Who needs a white Christmas when you can have a (white) sandy one? Enjoy these dive getaways for even warmer holiday cheer.