Diving in the Bahamas: Shallow Seas, Blue Holes and a Drift Called the Washing Machine

The name says it before you ever get in the water. Bahamas means shallow seas, and what you are diving is one enormous submerged limestone platform, with a few high points breaking the surface to make islands.

That geology is the reason to come. Flat, bright, sun-filled reef on top, holes punched down through the limestone, and inland cave systems on some of the islands.

Add water that stays warm all year and hurricanes that seldom strike, and you have a place that works as a dive trip in months when much of the Atlantic does not.

Where the diving is

The country is made of about 700 islands and more than 2,500 cays, spread across what the Royal Bahamas Defence Force counts as 470,000 square kilometers of ocean space. All the inhabited islands have local diving. That is an unusual thing to be able to say about an archipelago this size.

Some of those islands also have extensive inland cave systems, which is the other half of the limestone story. The platform is as full of holes below the land as it is below the water.

New Providence, where the sprawl of Nassau sits, is the least interesting island for diving. It is also the gateway. Liveaboard cruises around the archipelago run from there, which is how most divers see more than one island's worth of reef on a single trip.

Blackbeards Cruises is one of them, a liveaboard charter service docking at the Nassau Harbour Club Hotel & Marina on East Bay Street. You can find the rundown on the Wikivoyage diving guide.

Four sites to know

The guide names a handful of sites, and the names alone give you a sense of the range on offer here.

• Pacman Reef
• Lost Blue Hole
• Austin Smith
• Washing Machine

The Washing Machine sits off the coast of Highbourne Cay. The incoming tide funnels through a narrow cut and makes a current that carries you: down toward 40 ft, then a swell lifts you back toward 15 ft, over and over. The ride finishes at Basket Star Reef.

That up-and-down rhythm is the whole point of the site, and the reason for the name. It is the sort of dive people describe with their hands rather than words.

Water temperature through the year

The islands bask in the Gulf Stream, and the numbers show it. There is no cold season here, only a cooler one. Even in February, the quietest month on the chart, the water sits in the low twenties.

Late summer is the warm peak, with 31°C water in July, August and September and some of the smallest waves of the year. March, April and October show the biggest average wave heights on the chart, and they still only reach a meter. Figures come from Open-Meteo marine data.

A little history you will hear about

Columbus made his first landfall in the New World here in 1492, on an island he named San Salvador and the Lucayans called Guanahaní. Which island exactly is still argued over by scholars. Some say present-day San Salvador Island in the southeast, others Samana Cay.

The Lucayan people, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, had been on the islands for centuries by then. Spain shipped them to Hispaniola and enslaved them, leaving the islands mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648.

English colonists from Bermuda, the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled Eleuthera in 1649. The islands became a British crown colony in 1718 when the British clamped down on piracy, and an independent Commonwealth realm in 1973.

Planning it

The Bahamas sit southeast of Florida and east of the Florida Keys, north of Cuba and northwest of Hispaniola. Geographically they are in the Lucayan Archipelago rather than the Caribbean Sea, though everyone files them under the wider Caribbean anyway.

Nassau, on New Providence, is the capital and largest city, and the practical starting point. If you want reef beyond the capital's doorstep, a liveaboard is the way the archipelago is usually covered.

The economy runs on tourism and offshore finance, and the population is about 400,516. Expect a country that is well set up for visitors even on the quieter islands. More context sits on the Wikipedia entry.

Decide early whether you want warm, flat late-summer water or the cooler, quieter months at the start of the year. Both are divable. They just feel like different trips.

When you ride the Washing Machine off Highbourne Cay, log the depths it pushes you through and where the drift spat you out at Basket Star Reef, so the next diver knows what the cut does on an incoming tide. Add your Lost Blue Hole shots and rate the sites in Scubaspot.