Three Pools

Three shallow basins in the reef plate, one after another, are the way in and the way out. Each has a sandy floor 3-4 m deep and a coral saddle joins it to the next; you pass through all three, and the third and largest opens onto the sea. Coral lies close under you over the saddles, so this stretch is a buoyancy exercise before the dive proper begins.

Outside, a hard-coral slope of massive Porites with small pinnacles, salad coral and brain coral drops away. Descend to 15-20 m and swim a big anticlockwise circle with the reef on your left, then come back to the pools. Glassfish gather on the first pinnacles, and the sandy patches hold crocodilefish and scorpionfish. With the sea calm and air to spare, the dive can carry on north through a shallow lagoon to Moray Garden, 300 m up the coast.

Sunlight does the work here. Water this shallow over pale sand lets the light reach the floor, and one diver singles it out as the reason to swim the pools, calling the site modest but fun to swim through. The third pool adds a small cast of its own: Red Sea Moses sole and blackspotted pufferfish lie half-hidden on its sandy bottom.

That gentle format is why operators run training dives and PADI courses here, and why the site gets sold as calm and good for photography. On the circuit, Napoleon wrasse and moray encounters are reported, and one operator adds Picasso triggerfish and rays. A 2009 dusk dive here logged several octopuses, three torpedo rays and a banded sea snake.

Start at high tide. At low tide the site is tricky and the entry more prone to surge. Snorkel groups and quad-bike tours share the beach, and a diver in February 2022 found unsupervised snorkellers walking on the coral and quad-bike traffic along the access road.

At the shallowest, coral over the saddles lies under about 60 cm of water: trim flat, hover through each pass and keep fins well clear of the coral.