Dakar & Ngor

Dakar dives out of the city, and the day is shaped by that. The clubs cluster at the peninsula's northwest tip around Ngor, Les Almadies and Yoff, boats are small and mostly loaded off the beach, and a two-tank morning leaves the rest of the day free. A handful of sheltered coves work as shore entries, but nearly everything on the list is a boat dive, built around short hops between islets, capes and wreck sites rather than long crossings.

Underwater it is rock rather than reef: ledges, sand channels and stone under sponge and encrusting growth, with enough small life on it to reward anyone who slows down. Water runs to about 28°C at the warm end of the year and drops to 17–21°C once upwelling sets in, so pack more suit than 14°N suggests. Visibility moves with it, from around 20 m in the clear months to 5 m or so when the cold green water arrives, and the same site can feel like two places across a season.

Wrecks fill out the rest of the list, dived as swim-arounds rather than penetrations, and nothing here goes deep - 30 m covers the deepest of it. The overall character sits nearer temperate Atlantic diving than the tropics: volume of fish over structure, changeable water, and little in the way of coral cover. It rewards divers already in Dakar for work or for the surf off Ngor, and anyone happier tracking shoals across stone than counting coral species.