Kaikōura

A day here is built around the weather rather than a dive schedule. This is an exposed coast and the peninsula is the only real shelter, so crews read the swell and the wind in the morning and pick a side: a boat off the South Bay ramp if it has dropped, a rock or beach entry if it has not, and nothing at all when a big southerly is running. Most visitors book a surface activity first and fit the diving into whatever slot is left, which is the sensible order to do it in.

Underwater it is a temperate rock coast and nothing about it looks tropical. Bull kelp thrashes in the surge along the shallow edges; below that the reef is boulder, ledge and short wall carpeted in brown kelp, sponge and encrusting growth. Recreational diving all happens in the top 25 m or so, well inshore of the shelf edge — the canyon head is something you dive alongside, never into. It is why a cold, green, plain-looking dive can hold more fish than it appears to deserve.

The 2016 Kaikōura earthquake lifted long sections of this coastline clear of the water, by several metres in places, and rearranged the shallow reef and the access points with it, so current local knowledge counts for more than any printed site map. Add water between 10 and 17°C and visibility that swings from a few metres to twenty, and this is a poor choice for a first ocean dive and a good one for divers already comfortable in cold, moving water. The town's name describes a meal of crayfish, and the ledges still hold them.