Palancar Caves

The boat puts you on sand inside the wall, nine to twelve metres down with the reef between you and the open water, and the first thing you do is go deeper. A canyon leads out through the coral to the seaward edge, where the ground stops at about twenty-four metres and drops away past anything a recreational diver plans for. That is where the dive lives, along the lip and the buttresses standing above it.

Then you go into the reef instead of over it. Coral buttresses and pinnacles stand close enough together that the gaps between them arch over into tunnels, and the guide threads the group through them one after another. They are wide. Light falls into them from above and lands on the sand at the far end, so you can see your way out of a passage before you commit to it, and every one of them has an open route around the outside for anyone who would rather not.

You also swim. Cozumel sells drift diving and this section spends most of its time out of the drift: inside the canyons and the passages the water barely moves, then it accelerates hard as you round each point and pushes you into the next stretch of wall. That trade is the reason the points carry the thickest coral, and it is why divers who expect to be flown along this reef find themselves finning.

The end of the dive is a slow climb onto the top of the reef, eight to ten metres, with the safety stop somewhere above it. The fish turn up in the last ten minutes.

The name is wrong, and the way it is wrong is the most interesting thing about the dive. The decree that created this national park in 1996 called this stretch of reef Cuevones1, and the management programme still in force calls it the same2. Cuevones is the augmentative of cueva: big caves. The island now sells it as Cuevas, plain caves, and the English name that travelled with it dropped the augmentative on the way. The bigger word survives among divers, who still post about Palancar Big Caves.

What the English name promises is an enclosed overhead, and that is the one thing this site does not have. The passages are coral grown over a limestone base into shapes that arch and meet; the sunlight is in all of them and the exits stay in sight. Shops here say so in print, one of them under a heading telling you that you will dive Palancar's caves and will not be cave diving. Divers rank Cozumel's overheads against each other and put these passages at the easy end of the island. Nothing squeezes and nothing goes dark. The tight, black end of that scale belongs to the C-53's interior and to the Devil's Throat down at Punta Sur.

Where the section starts and stops is genuinely unsettled. It lies south of Horseshoe and north of Bricks. Past that, two of the island's shops publish maps of this reef that split the Caves name across two drop points and split it in different places, one model straddling Horseshoe and the other sitting wholly south of it. Nobody has drawn a line that all of them accept, so the stretch of wall you dive under this name is settled by the shop you booked and the mooring the captain takes.

The trade is the animals. Palancar is a structure to look at rather than a place to count fish, and this section is the most structural of the four: barrel sponges out on the wall, sea fans and gorgonians on the ceilings of the passages, hawksbills and lobster and the occasional nurse shark under a ledge, and long stretches where nothing much is moving except you. Divers who love this dive say exactly that about it, and they mean it as description, not complaint.

Book this section by name and book it early. Asking for Palancar gets you whichever of four dives the boat is running, at least one shop on the island does not sell the sections separately at all, and the far-south run is long enough that some boats want a group of six before they will make it. Ask a second question in the same conversation: which depth plan the shop runs here. The published plans for this one site differ by about ten metres, which is the difference between a dive inside an Advanced card and one that is not.

The name talks people into packing a torch, and nothing about this dive needs one. A light is worth carrying for colour, because the sponges on the wall only come back to their reds and oranges when a beam lands on them directly, and the photograph everyone takes here is a wide-angle frame shot from inside a passage looking up at the surface light.

Buoyancy is the part of your diving this site actually tests. An authorised guide is required by law on every dive in this park and will check it before you get in, and inside a passage the check earns its place: the ceiling is coral and it is closer than you think, and fine sediment sits in the lower crevices waiting for somebody to kick it into the water for the divers behind. Frog kick through the passages, hold position with trim instead of settling on anything, and stay a metre and a half off the coral. Gloves and knives are prohibited across the park, and steadying yourself on the coral is prohibited with them or without them.

Last, check what is open. Reef complexes here are rested in rotation, three at a time, as a defence against coral disease; this section takes its turn paired with Bricks and nobody publishes the year in advance. Ask your dive shop which reefs are resting for your dates. The rotation never takes the whole reef out at once, so a trip that misses this section can still dive Palancar.