Kosrae

Days are short-range and boat-based. Operators run small skiffs from the island's two harbours, Okat in the northwest and Lelu on the east side, and because the fringing reef starts close in the ride to a site is rarely long. Which coast you dive is settled at the dock by the trade winds: with no lagoon to duck into, crews work whichever side is in the lee and move around the island as the wind turns. Two tanks in the morning is the usual rhythm, boats back before the rain that this climate delivers most afternoons.

The underwater shape barely changes around the island - a shallow reef flat, a rim where it tips over, a face falling away into open water - and what differs is the angle. Hiroshi Point sits where the reef turns and fish stack along the edge. Walung, on a stretch of west coast the road never reaches, is dived as a slow cruise off the boat that brought you. The Blue Hole is the one site with a route to follow rather than a contour to swim. Little of it needs to be deep: the coral that justifies the trip sits well inside recreational limits, and the wall below is scenery rather than the point.

What you come for is the reef itself rather than encounters. Moorings mean boats do not anchor on the coral, and a dive is spent reading structure - how the plates overlap, where the rim rolls into the drop - instead of waiting for something large to arrive. That makes it an island for wide-angle photographers and for divers content with small lodges, quiet evenings and no dive-town scene. Surface days go to jungle rivers, mangrove channels and the basalt ruins at Lelu, the old seat of the Kosraean kings. Big animals show up, but incidentally.