Cabo Verde — Sal

Diving is run out of Santa Maria at the island's southern tip, and the wind decides the shape of the day. There is no harbour here, only a beach and the old pier, so the routine is an early briefing, a wade out and a roll-in entry, and a scrubbed morning when the surf is up. Runs are short and the standard pattern is two dives before lunch. When the north-easterly blows hard, centres drive north instead and dive the sheltered west coast, which keeps a week's diving going through most conditions.

The rock is the attraction and it behaves nothing like a coral reef: hard black lava with tunnels, arches and collapsed roofs, sand-floored chambers, and gaps where light comes through a broken ceiling. Growth on the stone is sparse, scattered hard coral and encrusting life rather than a reef community, so the interest is topography and fish. Sites split between shallow, sheltered ground that is diveable on almost any day and more exposed terrain further out, where current runs and fish gather in bigger numbers. Visibility swings with the swell, so the same site can be sharp one morning and milky the next.

Sal is flat, dry and resort-driven, and diving here is usually one thread of a beach week rather than the whole trip. It is easy to arrange through the hotels, and it works for divers who want water in the low-to-mid twenties well outside the European summer and are not expecting coral or unbroken clarity. The single wreck is a small one, deep enough to make a short and carefully planned dive. The season has two peaks rather than one: April to June and again in October and November are the calmest and clearest, July and August are the least settled with swell closing exposed sites, and the January-February trades bring choppier days and the coolest water of the year.