Top Night Dives Around the World

No matter how many times you've explored a single site by day, return at night and you'll be in for a big surprise. Perhaps no experience does more to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land than encountering the "night shift" -- the unfamiliar cast of strange characters populating neighborhoods that you thought you knew like the back of your hand. Here are some of our favorites:

1. Guam: Tumon Bay and Apra Harbor offer a lot of night diving. Dive shops in Guam regularly send out boats and often make an event out of it with a barbecue either on the boat or back at the dock.
2. Kona: The Manta Ray Night Dive is up there on the "dives of a lifetime" list. The mantas swoop in to feed on the plankton that concentrate in the beam from the dive light. Quite often, mantas with wingspans of eight to 10 feet encircle entire groups of divers; it's truly an unforgettable experience for divers of all skill levels.
3. Kauai: Sheraton Caverns is synonymous with turtles, but check it out on a night dive when it explodes with colorful cup corals, bull's-eye lobsters and tons of little critters.
4. Bonaire: Follow in the fin prints of Ty Sawyer and dedicate an entire trip to diving Bonaire at night. You'll need a permit to dive the Town Pier (worth the effort!), but there's plenty you can do on your own, including checking out the house reef off any resort and visiting the wreck of the Hilma Hooker.
5. Roatan: Giant-stride off the dive gazebo at Fantasy Island Resort and follow the line, first to the fuselage of a DC-3 plane and then to the 130-foot wreck of the Prince Albert. This pair of wrecks, accessible 24 hours a day, is perfect for a night-dive experiment -- start at twilight and then each night go in 90 minutes later than the day before to watch the life aquatic unfold as you've never seen it before.
6. Mabul and Kapalai Islands: These islands constitute two-thirds of the world-class dive destination off the northwest coast of Malaysian Borneo. The sites are shallow and loaded with rare macro life, and since most of the resorts are dedicated to divers, night dives are easy -- just grab a tank and wade in or giant-stride off the deck of your over-water bungalow.
7. Red Sea: Use your dive light to attract dinner for the lionfish and you may have company throughout the dive. Life on the reefs in the Red Sea is so abundant that a night dive almost anywhere is certain to be memorable.
8. Grand Cayman: The wreck of the 200-foot Oro Verde sits on a reef, so you get a reef and a wreck in a single night dive. Plus, the boat ride is quick -- the Oro Verde was intentionally sunk just off Seven Mile Beach.
9. Galapagos: Who but divers would travel so far and then dive so deep, at night, to see throngs of the wacky-looking red-lipped batfish that converge on a single site just off Wolf Island? The dive is in a protected cove, and the descent is alongside a rock-covered slope that leads to a sandy area at about 100 feet -- the lair of the batfish. On your way down, or up, scan the rocks for a big fat marbled stingray camouflaged as a boulder. 10. Indonesia: Bunaken Island is just a ferry ride from Manado off the northern tip of Sulawesi. This diving here is all about walls -- endless pristine walls whose entire surfaces come alive at night.
10. Dominica: Maggie's Point may be a bit humdrum by day -- just some coral and sponges with very little topographic relief -- but by night it's a different story. It seems that everything comes out after dark, from giant basket stars to flying gurnards and lots of octopods. A photographer shooting with film will have a hard time making it last more than 15 minutes.