Alor

Diving here means living aboard. The day is set by the tide rather than the clock, so briefings open with a slack-water plan and dives get moved or dropped at short notice when a channel is running too hard to work. Tenders put groups in up-current of a point and collect them wherever they surface, and negative entries are common on the exposed sites. Between dives the boat repositions between islands, and an afternoon often shifts into a sheltered bay once the straits are running hard.

Two very different kinds of diving sit within a short run of each other. On the channel sides, slopes and walls fall steeply into moving water that keeps the coral hard, dense and low-growing, with fish stacked into every break in the flow; the upwelling that feeds this can push a cold layer up the face mid-dive, and the temperature can fall several degrees inside a single dive. Inside the sheltered bays the picture inverts entirely: dark volcanic sand, rubble, still water, and everything worth seeing sitting on the bottom.

The area rewards divers who are relaxed about being moved around and who read water before entering it, and it punishes fixed wish lists, since weather and tide set the running order. Pack a thicker exposure suit than the rest of Indonesia calls for, because the thermoclines are the reason the recorded temperature range here runs down into the low twenties. What the effort buys is a schedule with no other boats in it, on a trip where the crossings between islands are a real part of the week rather than dead time.