Scuba Diving In Saba & Sint Maarten
Saba is a tiny island in the Caribbean that’s only 13 square kilometres and not well known in the travel world. Unlike its bigger neighbour Sint Maarten (Dutch side of island, Saint Martin – French side) only 49 kilometres away, Saba has no sandy beaches and therefore is not well visited by tourists except for scuba divers and ecotourists.
To get to Saba, you must fly to Sint Maarten which is a popular tourist island with an international airport. From there, you can catch a 90 minute ferry service to Saba or a small prop plane that will take you there in 20 minutes. My dive group took the ferry and responded quite positively with the free beer offered on board.
A great fact for scuba divers is that the entire water area surrounding the island is protected from fishing so the marine life is quite healthy. But since Saba is a volcanic island, don’t expect colourful coral reefs at the dive sites around the island since the terrain both above and below water is largely volcanic. However, there are some unique aspects with Saba scuba diving that make this destination worthwhile.
There are some formations called pinnacles which are hardened lava from the volcano that pushed up above the surface of the water like cones. One of them is shown in the dive boat photo below in the background. These pinnacles became much like coral reefs teaming with marine life and some of our dives during our trip were at pinnacles.
At one dive site, I saw the highest concentration of sea turtles I’ve ever seen all at one spot. A very unique attraction at yet another dive spot, we put our hands into the dark sandy bottom and felt the heat from the island’s volcano. Here’s a video of some Saba scuba diving.
On land, the island is hilly and rugged but uncrowded which is a welcome change from touristy Sint Maarten/Saint Martin. However, the night time is not exactly quiet as the island is full of noisy tree frogs as heard in the video clip below from my hotel room. But since our rooms were high on the mountainside with breezes, there weren’t many flying insects to worry about during our stay.
Saba is very much a scuba diver’s island since the diving is decent but there’s not much else to do apart from walking down to hang out at some of the local eateries at night. There is some hiking trails further up the mountain but that’s really about it so non-divers might get pretty bored here unless they were okay with just relaxing on the hillside accommodations with excellent views of the ocean below.
Our group dove with Sea Saba and would totally recommend them for diving there. They also provided us with free shuttle transportation between the main dock where both the ferries and dive boats were and our hotel.
Combine With Sint Maarten/Saint Martin
Many divers including our group chose to combine our Saba trip with a stay in Sint Maarten/Saint Martin since we had to travel through there anyway. After scuba diving at Saba, we also decided to spend a day of diving in Sint Maarten just for comparison. One of our group divers Thomas and I decided to do a shark dive that one of the local dive operators, Ocean Explorers ran.
The first dive was at a wreck and we were able to penetrate this ship. Inside the wreck were the largest spiny lobsters and the most numerous that we had ever seen anywhere in the world. We were told that this wreck was a protected site from fishing and therefore the lobsters inside were able to grow big and old. It was like a lobster party there.
The second dive was the shark dive. It was similar to the shark dive in the Bahamas but instead of kneeling in a semi circle like we did in that dive, we were instructed to just lie down on a ridge watching the divemaster feed the sharks. An entertaining feature with this Sint Maarten shark dive is that they passed around a slate board for us to write some words for a photo and you can see the shark below was quite puzzled by what I wrote.
The time on Sint Maarten/Saint Martin was more of an expected Caribbean stay with sandy beaches, restaurants and a drive around the entire island visiting both the Dutch and French sides. Combined with the more tranquil Saba, this made for a really nice overall dive trip.
