Scuba Montserrat Home    Montserrat's Diving    Diving, Snorkeling & Beach Trips    Kayaks     Courses   

  Our Volcanic Island    Meet and Greet    Contact Us    News & Events   Montserrat and Underwater Photos

Rendezvous Bay

Bat Caves

Little Bay

Harbor Side

Rainbow’s End

Pot of Gold

                Dive Sites

With over 18 years of professional dive experience and over 400 certifications, our dive staff takes great joy in introducing visitors to our waters.  Our services include introduction for beginning diver or snorkelers, furthering education of certified divers, and sharing our knowledge of the undersea world.  This includes children (and the child at heart)! Montserrat has 15 recognized dive sites, and of course we have a few secret stashes of our own.  Care to explore?  On especially clear days we enjoy finding new sites.  Here is the best part.... you find it, you name it!

Most of our diving is done on the  western (or leeward) side of the island, between Foxes Bay, going north toward Little Redonda.  The eastern side of the island, which is exposed to the open Atlantic often has high swells, but is a great diving destination, weather permitting.  The western side in contrast, is normally calm.  It is only in the winter months, that one might catch the occasional winter swell blowing in from the North West. This area offers a range of fascinating dive sites.   All along the coast you can find varying sizes of scattered boulders, the result of Montserrat’s volcanic eruptions.

In the shallows adjacent to the cliffs, (10 to 30 feet), we find large and small boulders left by one of the three main volcanos, covered with sponges and hard corals.  Brain corals, star corals, and pillar corals of all sizes, compete for space. Sea plumes and sea fans provide a fairy-tale forest for colorful reef fish dart about. A variety of sea snails forage for food. An occasional octopus climbs over rocks, and in small caverns, formed by rocks piled one upon another, one might spot a spiny lobster. Cleaner shrimps and tiny cleaner fish advertise their services.

A little further out to sea, at a depth of 40 to 50 feet, the boulder fields are replaced by rocky ledges separated by valleys that are often compared to isles in a supermarket. But what a supermarket! You could stay in one spot for an hour and still never see all of the stunning details on the “shelves”. This is the region where large barrel sponges mimic medieval castles, where the brain and star corals grow to impressive sizes, where small caverns fill with copper sweepers, spotted drums, and other creatures who wait out the daytime hours in the safety of their hiding places. Larger fish patrol the reefs and if you are lucky, you may find a sea turtle resting under a ledge.

At about 50 feet, the shelf of the island is covered with sand. The sand flat extends into the sea until it reaches the rim of the island's shelf in 60 to 70 feet of water. Here you enter the region of the deep reefs. They consist of large patches of rocky outcroppings embedded into the slope of the shelf. These areas are protected from the surges of most storms. The most delicate life forms of the tropical reef community can survive here. You will find spectacular brain corals, star corals, gigantic barrel sponges and slender tube sponges. The fish are plentiful and most of them carry on, undisturbed by the visiting SCUBA diver. You may encounter huge pelagic fish darting within the big open, blue sea.  Some areas may be covered with the delicate branches of the fragile staghorn coral, an ideal hiding place for the smaller and more timid creatures of the reef. 

The Shallows

Carr’s Bay

No matter what your experience, preferred diving depth or location you are sure to find something to thrill you!

Rendezvous Beach

© 2008 All photos on this site are the property of Dive Destination Montserrat and their associates.  These photos may not be used without written permission.