Diving at Shacks - for the second day in a row!
Shacks Beach - "our" beach, the beach just a few minutes' walk from home - is probably my favorite beach in Puerto Rico. That's saying something because Puerto Rico has no lack of beautiful beaches and truth be told, I still have a few to explore. Part of the attraction is proximity: It's hard to not to love a beach that is a five-minute walk from home. Part of the attraction is the lack of crowds. While other beaches (Jobos and Crashboat for example) are jammed with umbrellas, boomboxes and bodies, when Shacks is at its busiest, there are maybe a couple hundred people. Most of those are packed into one small area; the other two miles of beach are nearly empty.
Part of the attraction is the variety of activities: snorkeling and scuba diving over and through a 8,000-year-old reef, paddle boarding in a protected ocean pool (behind the aforementioned reef), kite surfing, surfing and just hanging out on the beach are there, all together in one spot.
Scuba diving at Shacks is a multidimensional experience. First there is the swim-out over Blue Hole. Not as deep as the famous 3,000-foor-deep Blue Hole in Belize (ours is more like 35 feet deep), Blue Hole is an area were the reef grew around a sandy area, making a hole in the ocean.
KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) view of the inner reef and Blue Hole.
The outer reef at Shacks is called a "finger-and-groove" reef system. The reef has grown in to long "fingers" with canyons between them. The canyon walls can be as much as 35 feet from the sandy bottom to the top of the reef.
This part of the reef is like Swiss cheese, riddled with holes, nooks, crannies and swim-throughs. Beyond the finger-and-groove is a long plateau of flat reef.
The dive then loops back around to the finger-and-groove. Going out we usually swim over the outer wall of Blue Hole. That's mostly to save air, so we're not using up air getting out to the cool stuff. Coming back into Blue Hole we swim through the reef, through one of several underwater tunnels that lead from the outside back in.
Once divers are back in Blue Hole, we can either swim across the sand bottom -
or go around the edge of Blue Hole. More swim-throughs and holes and cracks to the surface offer an incredible laser light show. (See the photo at the top of this post.) My dive buddy Darryl even does what he calls the "caverns tour" of the edges of Blue Hole, just to experience this. Many times he does the "caverns tour" as a second dive after diving the outside reef.
Either way, whether we swim across or around Blue Hole, one more swim-through tunnel leads back to the surface and back to Shacks Beach.
Every dive we do here is different. It's the swim-throughs and holes and cracks and canyons that make the experience at Shacks unique and very popular. Pretty much everybody (including us!) wants to dive Shacks. Unfortunately, Mother Ocean tends to limit our diving here to the summer months. Shacks faces due north, right in to the teeth of every swell coming down from the North Atlantic. Some years it's ever too rough to dive in the summer. Last year for example we only dove Shacks three times and two of those were lulls during surf season.
Anyone interested in diving Shacks please note: It is imperative that you dive with a guide who knows this reef. It is a beautiful dive if you know what you are doing. It can be dangerous if you don't To be honest, very few local dive guides are truly able to safely lead dives at Shacks. If you're interested, contact us and we'll hook you up, Mother Ocean allowing.
A quick transparency note: The photos in this post are not all from one dive. You probably knew that already but I just want to be clear.
Here is a link to video I did of part of the caverns tour: Into the darkness, into the light
(Sorry it has taken so long to post this.)
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