Scuba divers and lovers of underwater marine life have now got a real treat awaiting them, where they can feast their eyes on some of the world’s greatest creatures and amazing corals that lie below the sea.

An area of the sea at Carriacou has been protected and is now know referred to as the Marine Park area. The designated area stretches from Sandy Island’s turquoise waters and goes to the south to encompass the special Mangrove trees in Tyrell bay which are the home of the one of the world’s few surviving tree oysters. The large area also includes Maboya and the prominent peaks of the Sister Islands. With the likes of Sandy Island, Paradise beach and the oyster bed all part of this new initiative, it will help increase Carriacou’s marine life and the island will continue to attract tourists.

Marine Park protects underwater life and creates a wonderful opportunity for divers to see amazing marine creatures in tropical waters

This island’s underwater world is simply amazing. It is no wonder that there are so many shops stocking diving equipment here. The protected area now gives the wide range of diverse and beautiful sea species a space to live, multiply and enjoy their natural environment undisturbed and without fear of divers hunting for fish as a meal or for market. The recent law now protects them all in the same way as in Tobago Cays. Wardens patrol the area on a daily basis to ensure that the no one violates the laws and to ensure our visitors can enjoy the rapid growth of the various species.

Some of these species are only found in the tropical waters of Carriacou. The corals which often create a home for these fish forms part of the protection trust. There are moorings for the visiting yachts to avoid their anchors from damaging the corals and rocks. Thus Carriacou – the Land of many reefs – continues to be a jewel in the Caribbean, for astonishing under-water discovers.

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Barracuda Point, Carriacou is a premier dive site off the coast of the Grenadine island of Carriacou, one of the last tropical paradises on the planet. The diving sites around these crystal-clear, turquoise waters offer the most thrilling scuba diving opportunities in the world.

Scuba diving is an art and a science that, once mastered, allows you access to other worlds beneath the sea. To that extent, it’s a bit like training to become an astronaut, but rather more accessible. And the strange worlds you’ll discover down there are richer and more rewarding than anything you’d encounter on Mars. Underwater forests of twisted coral and an abundance of exotic, gorgeously-coloured and often downright grotesque aquatic life is waiting for you once you’ve learned the basics of scuba diving.

There are 20 prime diving sites off the island, most of them around the southern half, and all of them are accessible by boat from the beaches in less than 20 minutes. Most places, you have to schedule in a whole day for getting out to a diving site and back again, but one of the attractions of Carriacou for divers is that they can combine the diving with other activities.

There are the National Parks to explore, the Botanical Gardens in Hillsborough with their fabulous fauna and a load of other distractions. Diving enthusiasts bringing their families along can spend part of the day with them and the rest on their hobby, instead of feeling like a self-indulgent absentee parent storing up trouble for a backlash after returning home.

The diving sites are graded in terms of proficiency, with some more suitable for beginners and others more of a challenge for experienced divers. The beginners’ sites just tend to have more stable currents and be less deep, but they give access to an equally rich fauna and flora so there’s no sense of missing out on anything.
Barracuda Point is listed as suitable for experienced divers only, because of the fairly strong currents. The site is located off Sister Rocks, two rocks protruding from the Caribbean that create the currents, like the monster Charybdis in Homer sucking water in and out three times daily. It’s difficult not to draw comparisons with legendary landscapes and characters in this magical part of the world that’s so different from the humdrum daily life we’re used to.

At Barracuda Point, Carriacou the dive begins at 9 metres and continues to 23 metres, so it’s pretty deep. This dive is good for drift diving – allowing yourself to go with the currents and feel you’re flying through the water as you would in a glider through the air, getting about as close to a fish’s experience as it’s possible to get.

One of the two rocks, the Little Sister, affords opportunities for wall diving, i.e. diving along an underwater cliff face, obviously not suitable for beginners.
Amongst the wildlife you can see and photograph down here at Barracuda Point, Carriacou are nurse sharks, giant moray eels, turtles and of course barracudas, in their natural and exotic rock garden habitat.

But don’t worry, the sharks and barracudas aren’t about to tear you apart. The main things to beware of will be trying to catch anything or trampling the reef.
Happy diving!

Even if you couldn’t give a damn about Modern Art you’ll be impressed by the recent installation of sculptures on the sea bed off Grenada’s west coast, in Molinere Bay.

Forget the Damien Hirsts and Tracey Emins, and even Henry Moore’s graceful creations found in the grounds of historic homes and public buildings. The sculptures in Molinere Bay are extraordinary, tantalising and disturbing all at the same time.

They talk to us in a way that unmade beds and pickled sharks certainly don’t, and this may have a lot to do with the fact that they’re located underwater, an element deeply associated with the unconscious by Freud and Jung.

You have to dive down there to see them, into a world far removed from the National Gallery of Art. Moreover, they’re living sculptures, constantly transforming as corals grow on them and silt shifts and obliterates their features.

If this park was located off Florida or California there would be neon signs pointing the way, car parks, malls and an entire advertising machine working overtime to effectively ruin it. As it is, you have to hire a boat and find it yourself in the bay just north of St George’s, which is an intrinsic part of the creative experience. You’re interacting with these sculptures before you even know where they are. There’s something of the treasure hunt about it, of searching for a sunken pirate wreck.

The sculptures act not only as a nursery for the growth of new coral to replace the reefs that were decimated by tropical storms in recent years, but also as a celebration of local Grenadian culture and folklore. In an area where the locals have been exploited, marginalised and even killed down the centuries by European colonialists maddened by greed, there is a touching aspect to these works modelled on the ordinary men and women of the island.

British sculptor Jason de Caires Taylor created the figures after witnessing the amount of damage suffered by the reefs, and hit on the idea of using body casts of local people to illustrate aspects of Grenadian folk tales and history.

The result is awesome, and makes you think about Grenada in a new and unexpected way. Diving down to The Sculpture Park, Grenada is to enter the island’s secret life, like sharing someone’s dreams. And the dreams too are interactive. In complete silence, with only the occasional fellow diver coming into view in the distance, shoals of fish flashing by, finding these figures on the sea bed can trigger memories and reflections of your own and can be unsettling.

One woman diver said she couldn’t face La Diablesse, a she-devil from a Caribbean folk tale, an eerie, skeletal figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat, with encrusted eye sockets and weeds for petticoats. When currents stir up the silt and it swirls in lurid green mists around her, this figure is not something the sensitive diver would want to be around for long.

Other sculptures include The Lost Correspondent, a man sitting at a desk with a manual typewriter on it, gradually fading as nature reclaims man, desk and machine. Funny or frightening – the choice is yours, but paradoxically you won’t have any say in it.
Dive into yourself at Underwater Sculpture Park, Grenada.

Apart from all its other attractions, Carriacou has to be the world’s snorkelling paradise. The sheer unadulterated pleasure of lying face down in the crystal-clear, warm, turquoise water, with the sun on your back (don’t forget the cream!) and the currents gently moving you along is unbeatable. Let your whole body relax, legs and arms floating like seaweed on the surface, and look down into a world bursting with life and colour.

Carriacou’s long, white beaches, unoccupied apart from the odd turtle flapping its way to a nesting site, and the coral reefs ringing the island, make for ideal snorkelling conditions.

Just off the White and Saline Islands you’ll be treated to an astounding variety of brilliantly-coloured corals, amongst which dart the most beautiful fish you’ve ever seen, and anemones and polyps trailing their slender tentacles in the currents like glowing medusas.

It’s one thing watching this stuff on TV, but quite another to experience it for yourself. On Carriacou everything is geared towards keeping visitors happily occupied, and for the dedicated snorkeller there’s plenty of opportunity to indulge in what could easily become a favorite passion.

There are weekly trips from the island to prime snorkelling locations, and experts are on hand to offer help and advice to make the experience an unforgettable one. Of course you can just wander off on your own, but it’s better in the company of someone who knows the island and its reefs inside out and can advise you on the species you’re going to encounter in that underwater jungle. There’s advice for those new to snorkelling, too.

You’ll come across thick, rather-evil-looking moray eels that poke their heads threateningly out of fissures in the coral, and seahorses drifting in the currents like stately dragons, their equine heads contrasting strangely with their floating gills and grotesque latticework of appendages.

The varieties of brightly-coloured, flashing fish that dart about or simply swim leisurely past without deigning to even notice you will take your breath away and keep you completely hypnotised. You also have a good chance of encountering a turtle that might show a bit more interest, and that strange creature the stingray, like something out of a Sci-Fi movie, its vast lateral fins making it resemble a great, white bat.

The prime sites for snorkelling in Carriacou are located in sheltered bays and coves that are accessible only by boat apart from a few that you can wade out to closer from shore.

The boats that take you out are fully equipped with drying facilities, shower, shade and safety features.

Sandy Island is a popular spot for snorkellers who prefer to do their own thing rather than join a group. It’s a tiny island just off Carriacou that is so idyllic and beautiful that it has been used in commercials as the quintessential tropical paradise.
If you’ve never tried snorkelling before, come to Carriacou to literally open up a whole new world of interest and sheer amazement!

Diving in Carriacou is an experience no visitor to this tiny island paradise can afford to miss. It would be like travelling hundreds of miles to Paris and missing the Eiffel Tower. Diving is practically synonymous with a holiday here.

The scenery beneath the waters around Carriacou is even more beautiful and spectacular than that on the island, and just as easy to enjoy. With most of the best diving sites around the whole island, diving in Carriacou is unique in that the sites are a short trip of no longer than 15 minutes from the beaches, so you don’t have to book the whole day for the diving but can combine it with other activities.

There are 20 prime diving sites off Carriacou and 30 off the coast of Grenada, and a small army of PADI instructors qualified to teach the necessary skills at all levels of proficiency, from professional scuba divers looking to explore new seascapes to complete beginners who don’t know one end of a snorkel from the other.

The depths at the diving sites range from 15 to over 100 feet, and in these legendary turquoise waters visibility can be startling, up to 150 feet on most days, though turbulence can sometimes reduce it to less.

The time of year for diving is largely immaterial. Air temperatures maintain a fairly steady 83 degrees, and the rain that lashes down in short, sporadic bursts between June and November hardly interrupts the sun or the fun.

Drift diving is the standard practice when you’re out on the boat with a group. The divers in the water are kept on course by guides operated by dive operators on the boat, using buoys. This is like an Ariadne’s Thread, ensuring that nobody drifts off into the labyrinth of coral, never to be heard from again!

The only hazard, if it can be called that, is the sometimes strong surface currents, but an inflatable tube with a whistle and strobe device is often supplied in the remote chance of problems developing and you get separated from the group.

As with the National Parks of Grenada and Carriacou on the islands themselves, preserving natural riches for posterity, so the offshore regions with their aquatic life and coral reefs have been designated as underwater marine parks to afford them the same protected status.

Park rangers keep an eye on things with regular boat patrols, and divers are warned not to interfere with the underwater features. So should you feel an overwhelming urge to snap off a piece of particularly lovely coral for the mantelpiece back home be warned – you may be prosecuted. Eyes on and hands strictly off is the order of the day when diving around these pristine waters!

For beginners, Millennium 2000 is probably the best site to get to grips with the art and science of scuba diving, with only gentle currents and easy navigation.
There are also numerous other diving sites that can be gainfully enjoyed by all divers regardless of expertise, though some have stronger currents than others. Sharkey’s Hideaway goes down 72 feet and has some of the most spectacular underwater scenery and aquatic life, from nurse sharks and chubs to seahorses and stingrays.
Don’t miss the diving experience of a lifetime in the reefs around beautiful Carriacou!

What’s Diving Like on Carriacou?

Diving is as unique as one can discover at famous Dive Destinations in the Caribbean,
with reefs of great bio-diversity and in excellent conditions.

There are all in all about twenty sites to explore on Carriacou including reefs, walls and wrecks.

The depth of the sites vary from 20 feet (7 metres) to 130 feet (40 metres) – perfect for sport divers!

Visibility is between 40 feet (12 metres) to 130 feet (40 metres).

At the dive-sites ranges the marine life from small critters, like nudibranches, to colourful reef-fishes, murray-eels and lobsters – and impressive rays, nurse sharks and turtles… plus not to forget sea-horses.

What types of Boats are used for Dives?

Typically pirogues in sizes between 20 to 32 feet are being used with ladders for entry, since the groups of divers tend to be smaller than on Grenada.

What qualifications to the Instructors have?

All instructors have qualifications with PADI, the biggest worldwide diving organization, and carry insurance.

Is There a Re-Compression Chamber?

There is no Recompression Chamber on Carriacou. The nearest ones are in Barbados and Trinidad. Dive-shops on Carriacou tend to work closely with the one in Barbados which is only 40 minutes by flight and emergency plans are established.

Just as beautiful below the ocean’s surface as the scenery above the water, diving in Carriacou is a truly breathtaking experience.

Most of the best dive sites are located on the south side of the island, about a 10 to 15 minute boat ride from shore. There are several dive shops and charters ready to take visitors to some of the best diving in the Caribbean, including 30 sites off the coast of Grenada and more than 20 sites off Carriacou. There are also PADI instructors all over the island capable of teaching even the most inexperienced novices the ins and outs of diving in Carriacou. Whether it’s your first time out or you’re a scuba pro, diving in Carriacou has what you are looking for.

Observant divers can spot nurse sharks, reef sharks, stingrays, moray eels, turtles, barracuda, lobsters, shrimps, and all kinds of fish. There is also an interesting array of scenery, from gorgeous coral gardens and reefs to the mysterious ship wrecks in an area known as Bianca C. There is even an underwater volcano!

Photo copyright Carriacou Silver Diving

Site depth varies from about 20 feet to more than 120 feet, and visibility fluctuates from between 30 feet to nearly 150 feet. The best time of year for diving in Carriacou is just about any time you find yourself there. The average air temperature remains a fairly constant 83°F with gentle breezes. The rainy season lasts from June to November, but steady rain is only a brief daily occurrence; the sun still shines quite a bit during these months.

The following are some of Carriacou’s top dive sites:

Best Diving Site For Beginners

Millennium 2000 at Jack-a-Dan is perfect for beginners. The steep sloping reef is fairly easy to navigate, as there are no strong currents. Experienced divers will thrill at the challenge of night diving here. Marine life includes lobster, shrimps, eel, and the occasional ray.

Diving Sites For All Experience Levels

Diver’s Surprise/Lighthouse at Sandy Island is another steep sloping reef that is well-suited to divers of all experience levels. Soft and hard corals, sponges, barracuda, snapper, eel, lobster, and crabs abound.

Western Adventure at Sandy Island is also appropriate for divers of all levels, though there can be a slight current. This is another prime spot for night diving in Carriacou.

World of Dreams at Mabouya Island is a gently sloping reef, with extensive schools and diving that is great for all skill levels. Catch a glimpse of stingray, angelfish, and the occasional turtle.

Sharky’s Hideaway at Mabouya Island is a steep sloping reef with a maximum depth of about 76 feet. The underwater landscape is spectacular, moving from a lovely reef to an impressive rock garden complete with canyons. Schools of chubs, nurse sharks, and glassy sweeper live here, as do giant moray eels and porcupine fish. Though the terrain seems imposing, Sharky’s Hideaway is suited for all divers regardless of experience.

Diving in the Caribbean is truly an amazing way to spend a vacation. Why not try diving in Carriacou and discover all that the Caribbean has to offer?