Five of Diving’s Hidden Gems

The last thing you want is a truckload of underwater tourists getting in the way.

Diving is about getting immersed in part of the natural world that few people can, surrounding yourself in the pristine beauty of the reef and its life. For me, part of that is getting to experience that underwater magic with as few others around as possible.

Here, we’ve listed out five lesser-known but reasonably accessible spots to get your dose of exquisite, untouched marine beauty.

Skip ahead to:

Kadavu Island, Fiji

Bohol, Philippines

Bahia de los Cochinos, Cuba

Rowley Shoals, Western Australia

Bahama Banks, Bahamas

I thought I was going to die on my way to Kadavu.

Rain lashed the airport in Nadi and our little six-seater plane was skidding around on the inches of water covering the runway before it even took off. As we flew through a storm that other pilots were too sane to fly through, our usually jovial pilots fell silent as our tiny plane was thrown upwards and left to drop by merciless thermals.

But I can honestly say - the diving was worth it.

Fiji’s 4th-largest island has barely any tourist presence, leaving the pristine reefs either side of it largely unspoilt. One side of this curved island boasts a calm lagoon featuring brilliantly colored soft corals in crystal clear, warm water, while the other side, open to the elements, hosts the Great Astrolabe Reef, a hard-coral paradise in nutrient-rich water where I’ve had the closest and most spectacular manta ray encounters of my life.

Top it off with a volcano towering over one end of the island that yields yet another underwater landscape beloved by barracuda, giant angelfish and sharks, and you’re hard pressed to find a better diving location anywhere in the world.

Bohol is known for a lot of things - the stunning Chocolate Hills, beautiful beaches and of course those cute little tarsiers.

It’s also known as a beautiful place to dive, with warm, calm waters and beautiful marine life - and if you know where to go, you’ll steer clear of the crowds. I was on a small boat with only four other divers, and our driver, Divemaster and assistant all excitedly promised abundant marine life.

Boy, did they deliver!

At Black Forest, there was an embarrassing number of turtles, including two enormous fellas sitting atop coral thrones. A cheeky barracuda made an appearance at the end. Our next site was an amazing wall dive featuring massive schools of jacks and sardines, golden trevally, another HUGE barra lurking in a cave and the biggest gorgonian fan coral I’ve ever seen.

In my dive notes on the day, I wrote ‘epic’.

Bahia de los Cochinos is better known as the Bay of Pigs, and more synonymous with landing craft and soldiers than a diving destination.

But that’s exactly what it should be, because this off-the-beaten path paradise has a couple of little gems that are worth a look if you’re after something different. Like much of Cuba, the land is surrounded by steady, shallow water - until you reach a massive drop-off about 120 feet/forty metres from shore. This means Cuba is not a natural home for sharks and larger fish - one Divemaster I spoke to who’d led dives in Cuba for 20 years told me he’d only ever seen four sharks - but it has smaller varieties in spades.

That’s not what made my first dive interesting.

My first dive was a pleasant but fairly ordinary shallow swim, until through the water came the hulking shape of a sunken landing craft left behind during the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. Upside-down, it was perched precariously right on the edge of the drop-off, the yawning chasm perpetually threatening to swallow it whole. To swim up and over it, and descend into the very upper reaches of the abyss, was extraordinary - as was the brilliant coral of the wall dive that followed.

And then there’s the cave diving.

Cenotes - water-filled caves - are ubiquitous in Cuba’s limestone landscape, and brilliant for diving. The Cueva de los Pesces, literally Cave of the Fish, is reached by walking through jungle on the opposite side of the road from the northern edge of the bay. Suddenly it opens out and reveals an unbelievably clear pool full of fish. We descended into the pool and swam through a tiny hole, guided by our torches through the darkness, until stabs of light from above illuminated bright blue water amongst silent, solid limestone.

Both dives were like nothing I’d ever done before or since, and unforgettable.

I know we said reasonably accessible but…

Rowley Shoals are a group of three coral atolls in the ocean about 190 miles/300 kilometres off the coast of Broome, a town in the far north-western corner of Australia. You get to them via an overnight boat trip, and being as there’s nowhere to stay, diving them is a liveaboard situation for a few days.

Which, I guess, is why we haven’t actually made it there yet.

But it’s an essential on this list because we have it on good authority that due to its remoteness, it’s one of the most pristine diving locations in the world, and we’re absolutely chomping at the bit to get there. With an astonishing 688 catalogued fish species and 233 coral species, it’s a feast for the eyes and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The Bahama Banks offers a huge 40mi/65km long area of beautiful shallow-water diving.

But our advice is to head for the drop-off.

After a long boat ride from Eleuthera across the underwater dunes of the Banks, we made it to the edge where the coral gives way to the abyss. Jumping off a boat straight into water of incomprehensible depth always gives me a cold tingle, and looking down into the deep blue below me I felt that this must be as close as you can get to being in outer space without leaving Earth - dwarfed by blackness, silent, and alone.

But turning back towards the reef wall a reassuring kaleidoscope greeted me.

The wall was covered in hard corals, with huge coral whips extending outward from the wall. Most of the coral in the Caribbean tends to be various shades of brown, but at this edge there was a fantastic range of colour.

The fish life was equally vibrant, and the highlight was being buzzed by a number of huge sharks before they retreated into the void, their shadows hanging menacingly around, just far enough away that we couldn’t quite tell what type of shark they were. It was one of the best wall dives I’ve ever done.

Unfortunately, there was so much to see that my dive buddy ran out of air at 90ft/30m and we had to do an emergency ascent. Don’t make your dive memorable for the wrong reasons - safe diving, people.