Chitales Reef

Chitales is a bay-side reef, which on this coast means shallow, bright and busy with small fish. The coral sits in patches on sand at six to eleven metres, with seagrass filling the gaps, and a current runs across it from the south east most of the year, so you go in at one end and let it carry you.

The thing to look for is the staghorn. Branching, antler-shaped colonies grow in thickets here, and they are rarer across the Caribbean than their abundance on this one reef suggests. Around them the usual bay-side company: barracuda holding in the current, green morays in the coral, stingrays flat on the sand patches. Green turtles work the seagrass beside the coral, which is where you should be looking for them rather than over the reef itself.

Most of the reefs on this side of the island are interchangeable in a way this one is not. Chitales has an actual feature: living staghorn, in quantity, on a reef shallow enough that a diver on their fourth ever dive can see it. Given that this coast lost most of its hard coral to a hurricane in 2005, a thicket of a Critically Endangered branching coral at eight metres is the most interesting thing in the bay.

It drifts. Not hard, but consistently, and from a direction that means the boat picks you up somewhere other than where you went in. That is normal here and it is why the site is guided.

Staghorn snaps. It is brittle, it grows slowly, and a fin tip takes years off it. If you are still working on buoyancy, this is a reef to look at from a metre further back than feels necessary.