St. Eustatius

Statia's diving day is short-range and unhurried. Boats leave the Lower Town waterfront below Oranjestad, most sites are only a few minutes out, and with a handful of operators on the island a busy site means two boats rather than twenty. Two-tank mornings are standard, with afternoon and night dives added on request. Anchoring is banned inside the park and boats tie in instead, so nothing drags across the sites, and the shallow ground in the bay can be swum from the beach when it is calm.

The island is young volcanic rock and the terrain follows suit. Old flows stand a few metres proud of the seabed in parallel ridges, so rather than drifting one long reef you work a ridge, drop down its flank and cross the sand to the next, with the coral, sponge and sea fans holding to the high ground. Depths stay comfortably recreational and the water moves gently. The colonial-era material lies flat and scattered through the shallows; the one hull that still stands up is a modern cable layer, put down deliberately and deep enough to be planned as its own dive.

Most of what is down there is unidentified and probably always will be. Ships worked an open roadstead here rather than a harbour, riding at anchor off the town and exposed to any storm that came through, and the ballast piles are what that traffic left behind; attaching names to individual hulls is largely guesswork. The reward is reading a whole working anchorage instead of visiting one famous ship, which suits divers who like context and empty water — you will rarely share a site — more than anyone after constant big-animal action. Most people pair the diving with hiking the Quill.