Cat Island

Cat Island sits on the eastern edge of the Great Bahama Bank in the central Bahamas, a sparsely populated (around 1,600 residents) 48-mile-long island where the seabed drops from bank shallows to thousands of feet of open Atlantic within a mile of the southern shore. That bathymetry is the whole story: each spring, from roughly late March to mid-June, oceanic whitetip sharks (Carcharhinus longimanus) congregate in the deep blue off the island's south and southeast (near Columbus Point and the Tartar Bank seamount), following migrating tuna schools. These are baited blue-water drift encounters, not reef dives — operators suspend a scented bait crate at about 10 m and divers and snorkellers hover in open water with no bottom reference while curious, fearless whitetips approach and sometimes bump them. Importantly, the sharks are drawn by scent but are not fed. The Bahamas has been a national shark sanctuary since 2011 (commercial shark fishing, sale and export banned across its entire EEZ; longlines were banned back in the early 1990s), and Cat Island is the focus of long-running satellite-tagging research on this species; the documented aggregation here is one reason a globally collapsed shark — down an estimated 98% worldwide and now IUCN Critically Endangered — can still be seen reliably. Outside the brief shark window, local diving is thin: a roughly 12-mile fringing wall along the south coast (starting near 12–20 m and dropping past 1,500 m), scattered reef patches, blue holes, and a shallow shore garden are dived from two small resorts. Some operators run Cat Island only as a seasonal expedition (resort- or liveaboard-based) rather than year-round, so trips must be booked well ahead.

• Cat Island is one of the only reliable oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus) encounter sites on the planet — a species the IUCN reassessed as Critically Endangered in 2019 after an estimated global decline exceeding 98%, driven largely by pelagic longline fisheries. Researchers estimate a local aggregation on the order of a few hundred individuals.
• The encounters are baited blue-water drift dives, not reef dives: a scented bait crate is suspended at about 10 m and divers hover over open ocean with the white crate as their only visual reference, while the sharks — attracted by scent but not actually fed — approach closely and often bump divers out of curiosity rather than aggression. The shark season is short, roughly late March to mid-June, peaking in April–May.
• The whitetips congregate off Cat Island's deep southern waters following the spring migration of tuna; the island's bathymetry, where the bottom plunges to thousands of feet within a mile of shore, puts pelagic deep water right at the island's edge.