Crete

Day to day, Crete is easy holiday diving. Centres along the coast run two-tank morning boats with short crossings to the sites, and sheltered training bays like Mononaftis are straight walk-ins from the beach, so a bad forecast rarely wipes out the day entirely. Conditions are undemanding in the ways that matter — long bottom times, easy navigation, a thicker suit rather than different plans in the cooler months — and there is enough interest close inshore that night dives are a regular fixture rather than a novelty.

The island's limestone simply carries on below the waterline. That gives structure rather than colour: boulder slopes, arches, short swim-throughs and drop-offs that finish on clean sand, with little sediment to stir up and good light down the rock faces. Most dives sit in a band between roughly 8 m and 35 m, which makes for long bottom times, and much of the pleasure is in poking a torch into shaded cracks rather than swimming any distance.

The set pieces are the caves and the wartime metal. Swimming into the Elephant Cave means crossing from blue water into torchlight, following the rock passage up until the surface flattens into a dark air chamber hung with stalactites; the fossil bones held in the rock sit behind a look-don't-touch rule and the guides police it. The fighter aircraft is the opposite kind of dive — a slow circuit over open sand around an airframe the sea has kept surprisingly whole, wings and cockpit frame still legible after eighty years.

It suits beginners, rusty divers and mixed groups where not everyone dives, since the shore entries and short boat runs make half-days workable. Divers chasing big animals or deep steel will find it thin. Open Water covers the reefs and the shallow caverns; the Elephant Cave is the step up: guided only, with operators setting their own entry requirements — some ask for Advanced — and it demands settled buoyancy, because the interesting part is an overhead environment where a rushed ascent is not an option.