Go Dive Club
Puerto Roja
Hosted by Elena
The island keeps going under the water.
Eight divers on one boat, seven days, every meal and every transfer — on a coast that is arches, chimneys and wall all the way down.
From $245 per night, per person · everything included
You go over the tube backwards at eight in the morning and the cold gets to your lips before it gets anywhere else. Then you turn over and look down, and there is nothing under you at all — just black rock going away into blue with the light bending on it.
Everything here is vertical. The island came up out of deep water and never flattened out, so the diving is walls and holes in walls: a lava tube you go down inside, an arch you swim through, a bowl of basalt columns with black coral hanging off it at forty metres.
By the time you are back on the tubes with a coffee your hands are cold and you cannot stop talking.
Nothing here was designed for you. That is why it is worth the flight.
But a wall is only half of what you came for, and the other half happens with your tank off. Therefore here is a whole day on this island, from the bakery at six to the sky at half nine.
The village is still in shadow. The top of the island is not.
Eight divers, one skipper, one guide, and nothing to sit on.
You go in at six metres and come out at twenty-eight, inside the rock.
Nobody goes back to shore between dives. There is no point.
Forty metres of rock over your head and open blue at both ends.
Four tables. No menu. Whatever came in on the night boat.
Eleven years of survey data, in ring binders, on a shelf.
Thirty steps above the harbour and the whole island goes quiet.
Eight sites. Four of them have a roof over part of the dive.
Eight names does not tell you much on a coast like this one. But every site here has a swell direction that kills it and an hour that makes it, and Elena has eleven years of knowing which is which. Therefore the list below is what is possible, not what is promised.
You enter at six metres and leave the rock at twenty-eight
A lava tube open at both ends, running down through the old cone at forty degrees. Wide enough for two divers and black in the middle.
Boat · 8 min · Advanced · 6–28 m
Eagle rays hang in the lee of it doing absolutely nothing
A collapsed tube leaving a span of rock forty metres wide. You come through from the north and the light hits you all at once.
Boat · 15 min · Advanced · 18–34 m
A half-bowl of black rock with the whole island stacked above it
A curved wall of columnar basalt falling from twelve metres to past forty-five, hung with black coral from thirty down.
Boat · 10 min · Advanced · 12–45 m
A sand channel between two reefs, and they come down it
A sand road running between two lava ridges. Eagle rays use it as a corridor and bull rays sit in the sand at the edges.
Boat · 12 min · Open Water · 14–22 m
A pinnacle a mile offshore with a barracuda column on it
A seamount coming up out of deep water a mile off the point, with a permanent tornado of barracuda over the top of it.
Boat · 20 min · Advanced · 10–38 m
Volcanic sand, and everything on it is pretending to be sand
A shallow black-sand bay on the sheltered side. Angel sharks buried in the flat, cuttlefish in the weed, and a night dive that ruins people.
Shore · the north beach · All levels · 4–12 m
Warm water comes up out of the floor and you can put a hand in it
A drowned crater on the south-east shelf with gas still coming up through the sand. The water shimmers over the vents and it is warm to the touch.
Boat · 25 min · Advanced · 16–30 m
The island ends here, and the water knows it
The tip of the point where two bodies of water meet. A drift along a broken wall with everything the island has, in about thirty minutes.
Boat · 6 min · Advanced · 15–35 m
Cover for every diver, and the photographs from the water — handed to you at the end, not charged, not mentioned.
If anything goes wrong, that's on us.
per night, per person · All diving · Accommodation · All meals · Airport transfers · Dive insurance · Nitrox included
Plus the ride from the airport — $80 per person, charged once for the trip, not per night.
Elena arrived on a two-season contract to count black coral colonies on the north wall and never left. Eleven years later the survey is still running, on her own money, and the results are in ring binders behind the compressor. She has turned a boat around for swell more often than any operator in this archipelago and has never once had to explain why afterwards.
Owner and instructor
Came for two seasons of fieldwork on the black coral wall eleven years ago.
Skipper
Fished this coast for nineteen years before the shop existed.
Divemaster
Runs the Chimney and the arch. Has a hand signal for "swell is building" that nobody else on the island uses and everybody here understands.
Compressor and gas
Blends every nitrox fill on the island and analyses it twice. Will not hand you a cylinder you have not checked yourself.
Deep, navigation and night — on sites that deserve all three →
Five dives over three days. Deep on the Amphitheatre, navigation on the sand channel, night in the black-sand bay, and two you choose.
The walls here are deep and the second dive is where it shows →
Theory in an afternoon and two dives on thirty-two percent. On a coast where everything is a wall, it buys you real minutes.
Four hundred metres up, and the island is a map under you →
Up the old track to the rim and around the top. Four hours walking, two hours sitting down, and the whole archipelago laid out below.
Eleven years of the same transect, and this year is your turn →
The Thursday survey dive on the north wall with a slate and a job. Real data, entered properly, that goes into the same binders as everything since.
One breath, twelve metres, and no bubbles at all →
A morning in the black-sand bay learning to go down without a tank. Breath work on the beach, then line work, then the reef.
Twice a month the sea drops far enough to walk out on the reef →
Two hours on the exposed platform at the biggest low of the month, with somebody who can name everything in every pool.
No streetlight between you and four hundred metres of altitude →
Driven up the west road after dinner to where nothing is lit, with a telescope, blankets and somebody who knows the southern sky.
Screen printed on the harbour by hand, forty at a time →
A two-colour print of the whole island underwater — every site, every depth, drawn from Elena’s own survey sheets.
That is the number, and the nitrox is inside it. But a week on a volcano is not only what happens underwater, and the rest of it is where an island like this usually gets difficult.
This is not an easy island. There is one road that goes all the way round and it is single track for half of it. There is weather. There is a slip you carry your own tank down.
And none of that is your problem to solve. The boat from the ferry is Teo's brother. The cottage is open and the stove is laid. Lunch happens at the shack against the wall because Elena rang them on the way in and told them how many.
What you spend the week doing is diving, walking, and eating late. What you do not spend it doing is standing in a car hire queue on a volcanic island working out who takes cards.
“She cancelled the arch on the Wednesday and I was furious for about an hour. Then I watched the sea from the wall and I understood.”
— Guest, February
“I have dived for twenty years and I have never come out of a dive and been handed a binder.”
— Guest, September
“Carry your own tank down the slip. Honestly, it sets the tone and the tone is correct.”
— Guest, May
Cottage
The wind hits this building from three sides and you will hear it →
The keeper’s house at the end of the north road, stone-walled and half a metre thick, with the light still working above it. Twenty-five minutes from the harbour on foot and there is nothing else out there.
Rooms above the shop
Thirty seconds from your bed to your tank →
Four rooms directly over the compressor room, with a shared balcony that looks straight down onto the slip. You will hear the boat leave. You will also be on it.
House
Built into the slope, facing the notch in the cone →
Cut into the slope above the village with a terrace facing the broken side of the cone. Two bedrooms, a kitchen worth cooking in, and a car, because you will want to drive the west road at least once.
The weather runs this place and not the schedule. In a normal week Elena moves two dives and cancels one. In a bad week she cancels four and you walk the crater instead. If a fixed itinerary is what you need, book somewhere flatter.
The water is sixteen to twenty-two degrees depending on the month. That is a five-millimetre suit and a hood in winter and there is no argument to be had about it. People arrive with a shorty every season and every season they borrow a proper suit by day two.
And it is steep. The village is on a slope, the slip is thirty metres of concrete, and you carry your own cylinder down it. Nobody here thinks that is a hardship. If you do, that is a completely reasonable position and this is the wrong rock.
So you know what the weather can take away from you. Therefore the only thing left is how much you want to be in the water, where you want to sleep, and when.
From $245 per night, per person
5 nights · 2 guests
40% deposit · $1,350 now · balance 30 days before you arrive
Confirmed within 24 hours · a person, not an email
Dates move. Cancel free. If anything goes wrong, that's on us.
The trip you didn't take. The year you said next year.
On the last evening somebody will get the binders down and show you the same wall drawn eleven times. You will go home with a chart in a tube and a slightly stronger opinion about black coral than you had any intention of forming.
First light
The village is still in shadow. The top of the island is not. Light hits the crater rim first and works down the red face for about forty minutes before it reaches the water, and the whole time the harbour stays grey and cold.
There is a bakery on the harbour road that opens at six because the fishermen need it to. It smells of hot flour and diesel in equal measure and both of those smells will now mean this island to you for the rest of your life.
Elena is already at the shop. She has been checking the swell chart since half five and she has already decided which side of the island you are diving.
Loading
Eight divers, one skipper, one guide, and nothing to sit on but the tubes. This is a rigid inflatable, not a dive deck with a ladder and a shade cover, and you will get wet on the way out whatever the weather does.
You carry your own tank down the slip. Nobody does that for you here and nobody apologises for it — it is thirty metres of concrete and the boat cannot come alongside.
Elena briefs standing up with a slate, and it takes four minutes. Depth, the shape of the rock, where the current bends around the point, and what to do if it is running harder than she thinks. Then everybody gets on.
First dive
You go in at six metres and come out at twenty-eight, inside the rock the whole way. It is a lava tube, open at both ends, and it runs down through the shoulder of the old cone at about forty degrees.
It is wide enough for two and it is black in the middle. Your torch shows you basalt with the flow marks still on it, shrimp in every crack, and a disc of blue getting bigger below you.
You come out onto the wall at twenty-eight metres and the temperature drops two degrees in one fin kick. That is the thermocline and you will feel it on your lips. Above you, back up the face, the sun is doing something to the water that nobody in the group will shut up about at breakfast.
Surface interval
Nobody goes back to shore between dives. The skipper cuts the engine in the lee of the point and the boat sits there rolling while eight people eat bread and drink coffee out of a flask.
Elena gets a laminated card out and draws the next site on it upside down so the people opposite can read it. Somebody asks what the black coral at thirty metres was and gets a five-minute answer with a Latin name in it, because she is what she is and cannot help it.
Shearwaters work the water off the point the whole time. Once or twice a week something blows a few hundred metres out and the whole boat stands up at once.
Second dive
Forty metres of rock over your head and open blue at both ends. The arch is what is left of a collapsed tube and the span of it is bigger than it looks from the boat.
You come through from the north and the light arrives all at once. Eagle rays use the arch as a corner and there are usually two or three of them stacked in the lee of it, hanging, doing nothing.
But a swell running from the north-west turns the inside of that arch into a washing machine, and Elena will call it off from the surface without getting in. Therefore some weeks you get this dive twice and some weeks you do not get it at all.
Lunch
Four tables against the harbour wall and a kitchen the size of a van. There is no menu because there is no choice: whatever came in on the night boat, salted potatoes, and a green sauce that is on every table on this island and is different in every house.
You eat in your rash vest with salt still drying on your arms. The skipper eats at the next table. So does half the fleet.
It is loud and it is fast and you will be finished in thirty-five minutes, because the afternoon boat goes at three and nobody here has ever waited for a tourist to finish a coffee.
If you ask
Eleven years of survey data, in ring binders, on a shelf behind the compressor. Elena came here on a two-season contract to count black coral colonies on the north wall and she has counted them every year since, on her own money, long after the grant ran out.
If you ask she will get the binders down. You will see the same transect drawn eleven times and you will see what happened to it after the warm water year, which is not a happy chart.
Guests who go into that room end up doing the survey dive on the Thursday. It is the same wall you have already dived, with a slate and a job, and it is the dive people write to her about afterwards.
Evening
Thirty steps above the harbour there is a wall, and behind the wall the wind stops dead. That is where everybody eats.
The food comes out slowly and in the wrong order and nobody minds. Goat, if it is a Friday. Wine from the terraces on the west side that arrives cloudy in an unlabelled bottle and is much better than it has any right to be.
By nine you can see the lighthouse on the next island working, and by half nine the sky over the crater has more in it than anybody who lives near a city is prepared for.
6–28 m · Boat · 8 min · Advanced
The tube was made by the last flow that reached the water and it has been open ever since. You drop onto the shelf at six metres, find the mouth, and go down inside the island.
It is wide enough for two and dark enough in the middle section that your torch is doing all the work. The walls still carry the flow lines. Slipper lobster sit in the cracks with their antennae out and do not move for light.
You come out at twenty-eight metres onto the open wall and the water is two degrees colder in the space of one kick. But an overhead is an overhead, and therefore this is a guided dive with a hard turn-around figure, and the group goes in threes with a torch each — including the people who have done it before.
18–34 m · Boat · 15 min · Advanced
From the boat it looks like a notch in the headland. Underwater it is a room with no walls: forty metres across, twenty-two at the crown, and open blue at both ends.
Come through from the north and the light arrives in one go. Eagle rays use the lee side as shelter and there are usually two or three of them holding station there, side on, watching you come.
A north-west swell turns the inside into a washing machine and it does not take much of one. Therefore Elena reads the chart the night before and the swell buoy in the morning, and she has called this dive off from the surface without getting in more times than she has run it.
12–45 m · Boat · 10 min · Advanced
The old cone broke on this side and what is left is a half bowl of columnar basalt, curved, with the joints in it standing up like organ pipes. It starts at twelve metres and it does not stop where you can follow it.
Black coral begins around thirty and gets thick by forty. There are dusky grouper here the length of your leg that have been protected long enough to be curious instead of gone.
This is the wall Elena has surveyed every year for eleven years, and the marker pins from her transect are still in the rock at thirty-two metres. But forty-five is forty-five whatever is growing on it, and therefore this dive is planned on the way out and not adjusted in the water.
14–22 m · Boat · 12 min · Open Water
Two lava ridges with a road of white sand between them, twenty metres wide, running out to the drop. It is the shallowest thing on this list and the easiest, and it is also where most people get their best photograph of the week.
The rays use it as a corridor. Eagle rays come down it in twos and threes, three or four metres above the sand, and they will not change course for you if you are on the bottom and still. Bull rays park at the edges under a dusting of sand with just their eyes out.
Get low. Stay put. The people who chase them here come back with photographs of a tail going away, and the people who lie in the sand for ten minutes come back with something else entirely.
10–38 m · Boat · 20 min · Advanced
A mile off the point, coming up out of water far deeper than anything you will dive here, with nothing around it in any direction. That isolation is the whole reason it works.
There is a column of barracuda over the top of it almost every day of the year — a slow tornado, hundreds of fish, holding at fifteen metres and turning as one. Amberjack come up through the middle of it and blow it apart and it reforms in about ninety seconds.
The current here is real and it does not always run the way the surface says it will. Therefore the boat stays live, everybody goes in together on the up-current side, and everybody comes up on a marker.
4–12 m · Shore · the north beach · All levels
Twelve metres at the deepest, black sand the whole way, and the sheltered side of the island — so when the north-west is up and every boat dive is off, this one still runs.
What lives here is buried. Angel sharks lie in the flat with a millimetre of sand over them and you will walk your hands within thirty centimetres of one before you see it. Cuttlefish work the weed at the edges and change colour when you get close, which is worth the entire dive on its own.
At night it turns into something else. Octopus out in the open, cuttlefish hunting, and the sand itself moving where things are coming up out of it. It is the easiest dive on the island and it is the one that gets people into underwater photography.
16–30 m · Boat · 25 min · Advanced
A small crater, drowned, sitting on the shelf twenty-five minutes south-east. The rim comes up to sixteen metres and the floor is at thirty and there is still gas coming up through the sand in the middle of it.
You can see it before you feel it — the water over the vents shimmers the way air does over a road in summer. Put your hand flat on the sand and it is warm. Not hot. Warm, and wrong, and you will take your hand away and put it straight back.
But this is an exposed site with a long ride and it needs a flat day, and there are perhaps twenty of those a season. Therefore nobody sells it in advance. If Elena says the Cauldron on a Tuesday, you cancel whatever you had.
15–35 m · Boat · 6 min · Advanced
The point is the last of the island and the water on either side of it is doing two different things. Where they meet there is a line you can see from the boat, and under it there is more life in thirty metres of rock than anywhere else on this coast.
You go in up-current, get down fast, and it is thirty minutes of holding at fifteen metres while the wall goes past. Trevally in the blue, big schools of sardine that fold around you, and grouper sitting in every hole out of the flow.
It is six minutes from the harbour, which makes it the last dive of most weeks. But it is also the strongest water on the island, and therefore it is the one site here that nobody dives on their first day.
Leaves at seven, before the heat
You start at seven from the last house on the west road and you walk up an old cart track that was cut for taking sulphur down. It is loose underfoot for the first hour. After that it is rock.
At the rim you can see the whole archipelago, and you can see what the island actually is: one cone, broken on the north side, with a village in the notch. Nothing you learn about the diving here makes sense until you have seen that from above.
Bring more water than you want to carry. There is none up there and the wind takes it out of you without you noticing.
Thursdays only
Thursday morning, on the wall you have already dived, with a slate strapped to your arm and a specific thing to count.
Elena teaches the method on the surface for twenty minutes and it is not complicated. You swim the transect line, you record what is inside a fixed frame, and you do not guess. Two divers to a line so that everything gets counted twice.
Your numbers go into the binder. They also go into the report she still writes every year and still sends to a university that stopped paying her nine years ago. People write to her about this dive a year later. You probably will too.
Flat mornings only
An hour on the beach first, doing nothing but breathing, which is longer than anybody expects and is the entire foundation of it.
Then the line, in twelve metres of flat sheltered water, going down as far as is comfortable and coming back. Most people who have never done this get to eight or ten metres before lunch and are extremely surprised about it.
The last hour is on the reef with no line and no target, just moving around down there without a tank on your back. Divers find this unsettling for about five minutes. Therefore nobody warns them, because after five minutes they do not want to come up.
Spring tides only, twice a month
At the spring low the water drops off the lava platform on the east side and leaves a hundred metres of rock you can normally only reach with a tank.
Everything that was on the reef at high water is now in a pool. Octopus under ledges, brittle stars in every crack, blennies that watch you from a centimetre of water. Elena or one of the guides comes and names all of it.
Wear something on your feet that you do not mind destroying. The rock is sharp, it is wet, and there is no version of this where you stay dry to the knee.
New moon weeks
Twenty minutes up the west road in a van, to a turning circle where the tarmac stops. There is no light of any kind from there to the horizon.
It is cold. Genuinely cold, four hundred metres up with a wind off the Atlantic, and the blankets in the back of the van are not decorative. Take the jumper you did not think you would need on a dive holiday.
The telescope is old and good. But the thing people remember is not the telescope — it is the ten minutes at the start, before anybody sets anything up, when your eyes adjust and the sky simply keeps getting deeper.
Starts Monday and Friday
Five dives, three days, and every one of them is a site people fly here to do anyway. The deep dive is on the Amphitheatre wall. Navigation is on Ray Alley, where a compass error means you walk into a lava ridge and learn something. Night is in the black-sand bay.
Four students to an instructor and no more. The reason is the Chimney: you will be taken through an overhead on this island at some point, and Elena will not sign somebody off to thirty metres she has not watched properly.
You finish qualified to thirty metres, which on this island opens up four sites that were closed to you on Monday.
Any afternoon, on request
Three hours of theory in the shade behind the shop and a written test that nobody has ever failed. Then two dives, analysing your own cylinder each time, because that is the actual skill.
On this island it earns its keep on the second dive of the day. The Amphitheatre and the Tower both sit deep enough that air puts you on a short clock, and the difference on the repeat is not small.
Fills are included for the rest of your week once you hold the card. Elena does not charge separately for the gas — it is in the number you already paid.
On the shop wall
Somebody in the village prints these on a table in his front room, forty at a time, two colours, on heavy paper. They come out slightly different every run and the ones where the two colours miss each other go for less.
The drawing underneath it is not decoration. It is traced off Elena's own bathymetry sheets, so the depths on it are the depths, and the sites are where they actually are rather than where a designer thought they would look good.
It goes home rolled in a tube. Half the divers on this island have one on a wall somewhere and recognise each other's houses because of it.
Cottage · 38 m²
The wind hits this building from three sides and you will hear it
The keeper’s house at the end of the north road, stone-walled and half a metre thick, with the light still working above it. Twenty-five minutes from the harbour on foot and there is nothing else out there.
Rooms above the shop · 24 m²
Thirty seconds from your bed to your tank
Four rooms directly over the compressor room, with a shared balcony that looks straight down onto the slip. You will hear the boat leave. You will also be on it.
House · 95 m²
Built into the slope, facing the notch in the cone
Cut into the slope above the village with a terrace facing the broken side of the cone. Two bedrooms, a kitchen worth cooking in, and a car, because you will want to drive the west road at least once.
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