Belize is a wonder of explorations for scuba divers. It is surrounded by Mexico on the north and Guatemala on the South and West with the Caribbean Sea on the East. A great place for divers of all levels is the Turneffe Atoll. It is 35 miles offshore from Belize City. Turneffe Island Lodge has 14 acres of private beach in the Western Caribbean. Belize has the world’s greatest reef, which is the second largest in the world and is the longest in the western hemisphere. The island is 36 miles long and has more than two hundred sunken islands to explore. When diving in Belize you will find seventy types of hard corals and as many as 500 different species of fish. One great feature of Turneffe lodge is it will limit the number of divers to twenty-two and the total number of guests to forty at any time.

Aruba is a short 19 miles north of Venezuela and has something for everyone. The south coast of Aruba has a reef face that drops one hundred and thirty feet, which is great when most dive sites only reach about sixty feet down. However, the best part of diving in Aruba is the magnificent shipwreck sites that are just waiting to be investigated. Antilla is a 400-foot German freighter that is listing heavily to port in fifty-five feet of water. History has it that the ship came to port in Aruba by mistake and rather than be captured by the Dutch authorities, her caption ordered the flooding of the ship’s engineering compartment. When the cool water of the ocean hit the hot boilers, she exploded and split in two. Be sure to visit the Convair 400 airplane from a drug-smuggling bust in the late 1980’s that was sunk to make an artificial reef.