Diving in Aruba: Wrecks, Warm Water and Short Boat Rides

Most Caribbean islands sell you reef. Aruba sells you steel.

Two ships carry the island's reputation with divers: the SS Antilla and the SS Pedernales. They are the names you hear first when anyone talks about diving here, and they are the reason a lot of people book the trip at all.

The other reason is simpler. The water is warm all twelve months, and the logistics are gentle. Many Aruban dive shops will pick you up at your hotel, run you to the dock or the shop, and drop you back afterward. No rental car, no wrong turns, no hunting for parking with a tank in the trunk.

A small island on a South American shelf

Aruba sits in the southern Caribbean, 29 kilometres north of Venezuela's Paraguaná peninsula and 80 kilometres northwest of Curaçao. Geologically it belongs to South America, resting on the continental shelf, and together with Bonaire and Curaçao it makes up the ABC islands.

It is not a big place. The island covers 179 square kilometres, runs 32 kilometres from its northwestern to its southeastern end, and is only 10 kilometres across at its widest. Oranjestad is the capital, and around 108,880 people live here, roughly a third of the whole Dutch Caribbean population.

Aruba is a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a status it took on in 1986. Aruban citizens share Dutch nationality, and the island has no administrative subdivisions at all, just eight regions kept for census purposes.

The two wrecks everyone comes for

The Wikivoyage diving guide lists the SS Antilla and the SS Pedernales among Aruba's dive sites, and those are the names that end up on the whiteboard at almost every shop.

A wreck gives you something a reef does not: structure. Plating, frames, openings, a shape you can orient yourself against and swim around rather than simply along.

Plan on diving both if you have the days. One trip, two different ships, and a pair of log entries you will actually remember the names of.

Weather that stays out of your way

Here is Aruba's real advantage. Unlike most of the Caribbean, with its humid tropical climate, Aruba is dry, with an arid xeric landscape. The warm, sunny weather holds through the year rather than arriving in a season.

That means there is no obviously wrong month to come. The sea sits in the mid to high twenties Celsius all year, peaking in the fall.

September and October are the warm, calm end of the marine data: sea temperatures of 29°C and wave heights around a metre. The spring and midsummer months sit a couple of degrees cooler with slightly more movement on the surface. None of it is dramatic, which is rather the point of Aruba.

Planning a week here

Because the island is only 32 kilometres long, nothing is far from anything. Pick a hotel, confirm the shop picks up there, and you have removed most of the friction from a dive holiday before you land.

With no districts to learn, you will hear places named instead. Oranjestad for the capital, and the dive docks from there. Keep the itinerary loose and let the boat schedule shape your days.

And the trivia for the bar: the Spanish once wrote these islands off as islas inútiles, useless islands, for their lack of mineral wealth. Then in 1824 a 12-year-old herder named Willem Rasmijn found gold on Aruba and started a gold rush.

When you surface off the Antilla or the Pedernales, log the dive while the detail is fresh, drop in your photos of the hull, and give the site a rating so the next diver deciding between the two ships has something to go on. You can start your Aruba log at Scubaspot.