Grenada

Almost all of the diving runs from day boats on the sheltered leeward coast, with operators clustered around St George's, the lagoon and the hotel strip at Grand Anse. Runs out to the sites are short, so the working pattern is a two-tank morning, lunch ashore and an optional afternoon or night dive. A few entries can be made from the beach, but the boat is what reaches the wrecks, and the day's site list comes down to which stretch of coast is out of the swell.

Grenada is a volcanic island, and the ground underwater follows suit: sloping shelves and low coral ridges rather than the sheer walls found further north in the Caribbean. Reefs run in long bands parallel to the shore, cut by sand chutes where the slope steepens, and a mild current usually sets along them, so many dives are worked as easy one-way drifts. The sheltered bays are the calm end of the scale, shallow and slow, where the dive narrows to whatever is living on a single coral head, while exposed points carry more water movement and bigger fish.

The island trades on its wrecks, and there are more of them than the famous one: cargo ships and smaller hulls, some lost and some put down deliberately along the leeward coast, several shallow enough for a relaxed dive and thoroughly grown over. The deep wreck off the southwest tip is a conditions dive rather than a scheduled one, sitting exposed offshore and often swept by current, so crews want settled water, a short planned bottom time and the freedom to swap it out when swell builds. The sculpture site is the other extreme, shallow and bright, shared with snorkel boats and best taken on the first slot of the day before fins stir the sand.

That range is the point. A week here usually mixes shallow reef and the smaller hulls with a couple of deeper days, and the sites sit close enough together to fit wreck or nitrox training around normal diving rather than instead of it. It suits people who like structure, variety and a bit of history more than pure wall diving, and it works as a half-day habit: the boats are back by lunch, and the interior, with its rainforest, crater lake and spice estates, takes the rest.