Barbados

Barbados is the easternmost island of the Caribbean, and essentially all of its diving sits along the calm leeward west and southwest coasts — the same sheltered shores that built its resort industry. This is wreck-and-turtle diving with very easy logistics, not a pristine-reef destination. Carlisle Bay, the broad anchorage next to Bridgetown, is managed as a marine park by the Coastal Zone Management Unit: six small wrecks, from the 1919 tug Berwyn to the Bajan Queen party boat scuttled in 2002, sit on sand and seagrass in 4–17 m, making one of the Caribbean's best snorkel-to-training wreck clusters. Up the coast off Prospect lies the serious dive — the SS Stavronikita, a 365 ft (111 m) Greek freighter gutted by a fatal fire in 1976 and scuttled with US Navy demolition charges in 1978, its bow at about 21 m and propeller near 40 m. Fringing and bank reefs such as Dottins and Maycocks carry sponges, soft coral and schooling fish, but the honest picture is that Barbados' inshore reefs have been degraded for decades by coastal development and disease: stony coral tissue loss disease was confirmed on the west coast in May 2023, and the record 2023–24 marine heatwave — compounded by Hurricane Beryl's waves in July 2024 — drove the island's largest elkhorn coral population to the brink of local extinction. What endures is the turtles: the University of the West Indies' Barbados Sea Turtle Project (running since 1987) documents one of the wider Caribbean's largest hawksbill rookeries, and hawksbills are a near-guaranteed sighting on west-coast reefs and wrecks. Two more caveats a dive buddy would mention: Bridgetown's cruise port adjoins Carlisle Bay (over 816,000 cruise visitors in 2024 and still climbing, so snorkel-boat traffic in the bay is constant), and the famous catamaran 'swim with the turtles' stops hand-feed wild green turtles — a provisioned encounter, not a natural one. Diving runs year-round in 26–29°C water with 15–25 m visibility; December–May is the settled dry season, while June–November is the wet season and Atlantic hurricane season — Barbados sits southeast of most storm tracks, but Beryl showed it is not immune.

• The SS Stavronikita is the flagship dive: a 365 ft (111 m) Greek freighter that caught fire at sea in August 1976 with the loss of six crew, was towed to Barbados, and was scuttled off Prospect in November 1978 with demolition charges set by a US Navy team. She sits upright about 400 m offshore with the bow at roughly 21 m, the deck near 24 m and the propeller at about 40 m — a genuinely serious deep wreck, not a tourist bauble.
• Carlisle Bay Marine Park, beside Bridgetown, packs six wrecks into 4–17 m of sand and seagrass — the Berwyn (a 21 m tug scuttled by her own crew in 1919), a WWII naval landing barge, a relocated hull section of the U-boat-torpedoed Cornwallis, the concrete-hulled Ce-Trek (1986), the drug-seizure freighter Eillon (1996, with a trapped, unbreathable air pocket) and the 120 ft Bajan Queen party boat (2002). The closest wrecks lie 150–200 m off the beach, making it ideal training and snorkel terrain.
• Barbados hosts one of the largest hawksbill turtle rookeries in the wider Caribbean: a peer-reviewed study by the UWI-based Barbados Sea Turtle Project estimated about 1,250 nesting females, with index-beach nest counts (monitored since 1992 at Needham's Point, the southern arm of Carlisle Bay) increasing as much as 8-fold; a national moratorium on turtle capture has been in force since July 1998.