Santo diving offers great access to some of the world’s finest reefs and underwater caves, plus two of the world’s most accessible shipwrecks. On the reefs, and in the underwater caves, you can see hundreds of colourful and interesting fish.

Dive operators tend to stick to the south-east coast, where you will find the wrecks of the SS President Coolidge and the USS Tucker and an area known as ‘Million Dollar Point’. However, great reef dives can be found all along the coastline. Most of the wreck and reef diving is suitable for divers of any ability, provided you have completed basic training.

These two quality wreck dives are just meters from the Vanuatu coast, both highly accessible to those diving on the island of Santo.

The SS President Coolidge is a American luxury liner converted to a US troop ship during the second world war. It sank just meters from the shore and is generally considered the largest accessible wreck dive in the world, and the top dive in Santo. Novices can dive the main bulk of the ship, whereas more experienced divers can go deeper into the wreck to look at life on the inside.

The SS Tucker, an American destroyer that was stationed in Vanuatu during WWII, is the second wreck. Unfortunately it was accidently sunk by one of the USA’s own mines, and now it too lies just offshore, close enough to be accessible to those diving in Santo.

Diving the relatively shallow Million Dollar Point, divers can see huge areas of military war surplus that was simply dumped into the ocean when the Americans left Vanuatu at the end of the war. This Santo dive includes ammunition boxes, military vehicles and the odd bulldozer - items which make this one the most popular sites when diving in Santo.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under scuba diving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.