Blue Corner

The current takes hold the instant you clear the reef edge. On your guide's signal you set a reef hook into bare rock and hang there, suspended in blue, while the ocean pours over you like a river. Below, grey reef sharks carve slow arcs through the surge; a wall of barracuda materialises from the deep, holds formation for thirty seconds, and dissolves back into nothing.

Blue Corner off Ngemelis Island in Palau ranks among the best dives in the world, and it was found by accident: Fish 'n Fins guides swam on from the Blue Holes one day and met sharks everywhere. Palau invented the reef hook, the carabiner-and-line rig set into bare rock that lets a diver hang in currents which can flip direction, horizontally and vertically, at any moment. The current does the gathering: grey reef sharks, big schools of barracuda, Napoleon wrasse and eagle rays converge over a plateau at fifteen to twenty metres. Visibility swings with the tide, from around sixteen metres on an outgoing flow to twenty-eight and more on an incoming one. Guides choose the entry, the hook-in point and whether the dive runs at all; slack tide can admit newer divers, but the corner rewards calm, experienced ones.