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The Planet’s 50 Greatest Dives
Epic dives with colorful reefs, big animals, haunting wrecks — 50 sites for every diver’s bucket list!
If you were given one week to dive and could choose any sites in the world with which to fill your logbook, where would you go? We asked a number of underwater photographers, writers and our readers, and got a remarkable sampling of dives that cover just about everything this planet has to offer. From the remarkable macro of Lembeh Strait to the shark dives of the Bahamas, magical reefs in Fiji and wrecks in the Red Sea, there are plenty of sites you’d expect to see, but an even greater number of surprises.
For example, #23 on our list, the Bahamas wreck Ray of Hope:
Like peanut butter and chocolate, New Providence Island’s Ray of Hope perfectly marries two of divers’ favorite things: the massive wreck of a 200-foot-long former freighter with dozens of gray reef sharks. Purpose-sunk in July 2003, Ray of Hope would be a marvelous dive in its own right — it’s relatively shallow (70 feet at the deepest), intact and sits upright in a bed of white sand. It’s the location that makes the dive so special though; because it’s only a few hundred feet from Shark Arena, the sharks, along with massive groupers and the occasional stingray, are always hanging around. And for the “shark-wreck” lover in all of us, that’s a recipe for success.
View all 50 of the planet’s greatest sites.
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— David Espinosa, Editor-in-Chief, Sport Diver and Sport Diver Asia Pacific
