Scuba diving at Shacks

Shacks Beach - the beach right in front of Villa Tropical and just down from us - is one of the best dive sites on this side of the island. It's a shore dive which means we just walk in to the ocean, swim out a little way across Blue Hole, and then drop into a beautiful reef.

The "outside reef" - outside Blue Hole - is a "finger-and-groove" reef. The reef forms canyons that we swim through. It reminds me of films of fly-bys through canyons in the American Southwest: swimming along 30'-40' underwater with these walls of coral soaring above us.

The entire reef is like Swiss cheese, riddled with holes and ledges, some you can swim through, some you can swim under. There are three tunnels through the outer reef that we use to back into Blue Hole. In fact there are tours of the tunnels and swim-throughs in and around Blue Hole.

A KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) shot of the reef at Shacks Beach. Blue Hole is at the top left. The inner shallow reef takes up most of the photo. The deeper outer reef is to the right.

Lately, Darryl has been taking a new route out of Blue Hole back to the inner reef. The "old" route was more direct but came through a kinda tight space. The new route, part of which is pictured above, is up and over and through several different passages before coming out on top of the inner reef.

I love diving out there. We wait all winter for the calmer flatter waters of summer so we can dive Shacks. During the winter - surf season - Shacks is usually to rough to dive. That's when we dive "around the corner" on the west side at Natural and Crashboat.

But now it's summer and time to dive Shacks!