Intermediate Turks and Caicos Islands
Turks and Caicos Islands
A wall two hundred meters from the beach, with humpback whales crossing the channel in winter
On the eastern island, the wall is so close to shore you can swim to it: two hundred meters of shallows, an edge at around ten meters, and a drop-off that continues far beyond diving range.
In this guide you'll find how diving works across this archipelago of banks and channels, where the walls are, what the winter passage of humpback whales through the channel means, when to go, and at what level.
It's one of the few places in the Caribbean where a first-class oceanic wall is reachable without a boat, and where the very channel that forms it is a whale migration corridor.
Geography and access
The archipelago is made up of two island groups sitting on separate carbonate banks, divided by a deep channel.
The banks are shallow and extensive, with sand, seagrass, and reefs; the edge of each bank drops away as a wall into water hundreds and thousands of meters deep.
On the main island of the eastern group, the edge of the bank passes two hundred meters from the beach, making it possible to reach the wall by swimming from shore.
The channel separating the two banks is deep and acts as a corridor: every winter, humpback whales pass through it on their migration to their breeding grounds.
The absence of rivers and significant relief, combined with the filtering effect of the shallow banks, accounts for some of the highest visibility in the Caribbean.
Access is by direct international flight from North America to the western group, with short inter-island flights.
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