8 May Diving St Helena

The water around St Helena is gin clear and 24°C warm and the fish are plentiful. St Helena legislation requires everyone to dive with a professional guide, no diving on your own due to safety concerns.

Our first dive was on the regular Saturday morning trip run by Sub Tropical diving. They picked us up from Jackster and we shot along the south coast to dive a fishing boat wreck called the Bed Gellet. There's no wreck penetration allowed on St Helena, again safety concerns, and the five huge lobsters inside the wheel house waved their horns at us and laughed, safe we couldn't touch them.

Fifteen minutes in to the dive the first Chilean Devil ray appeared, swooping through the divers, then another and another until we were swimming with five animals. Chilean Devil rays are as large as manta rays but belong to the mobula family. They stayed half an hour, coming closer and closer to check us out. At one point I had to move my head sharply to avoid contact. And finally a further three arrived and stayed with us until we had to surface.

We went on to do another five dives before we left St Helena, all with Into the Blue. They operate on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons and when we had more than four divers we could do additional days. One was to Boyles caves which was our favourite dive; an arch, swim throughs, more big lobsters, speckled morays, octopus they were all there. What we didn't see were any sharks, apparently they are a very rare sighting. One group, not us, encountered a whale shark on the pinnacle dive. We saw our whale sharks, about 10m long, swimming on the surface through the mooring field on three occasions. We also had the Devil Rays swimming on the surface around the boats.

The quality of diving is good. We never experienced any strong current, mostly it was no current and sometimes there was a little surge along the rock face. The topography is rocks, swim throughs, rock reefs with fissures and soft corals, plenty of wrecks and clouds of fish. The Devil Rays are inquisitive and whale sharks possible between January and May.