RMS Rhone & Salt Island

Almost every dive here is a boat dive out of Tortola or Virgin Gorda, and the runs are short: the islands holding the sites sit across Sir Francis Drake Channel, in sight of the harbours. A morning two-tank is the standard product. The other common pattern is rendezvous diving, where a crew meets a bareboat or crewed charter yacht at the moorings and puts guests in from its own deck, which is why a lot of dive weeks here are really sailing weeks with tanks attached.

Boats pick up National Parks Trust moorings rather than anchoring, and on a busy morning you wait your turn for a ball. The ground away from the wreck is rock rather than coral wall: volcanic stone worn into boulders, ledges and swim-throughs, most of it inside 25 m, with coral and sponge growing as a crust over the structure. Shape and the light coming down through the gaps carry those dives more than colour does.

The two halves of the Rhone are normally dived in sequence on one trip, the deeper section first and the shallow one after, and that second dive can run long or, on some boats, be done at night. The wreck lies inside a marine park, so salvage and souvenir collecting are off the table and the fittings stay where they lie. The 1977 film The Deep shot its underwater sequences on the site, which did a lot for its profile.

Ground swell can close the exposed Rhone outright, most often through the Aug-Oct hurricane months, and boats move to the sheltered channel-side sites when it does. Short runs, a compact site list and a strong non-diving offer make this workable for mixed groups. The other wreck people ask about, the Kodiak Queen off Virgin Gorda, carries a widely repeated Pearl Harbor history that is hard to verify. What the BVI does not offer is ocean wall, long drift or dependable big-animal encounters.