The eastern Caribbean island of Dominica sparkles with natural gems for scuba divers and travelers alike, from towering waterfalls to plunging underwater drop-offs.

Scott’s Head Drop-off is an incredibly vibrant dive site, plastered in color like a rain-soaked sidewalk covered in springtime flower petals. Jaunty sponges of all stripes — azure vase, tube, rope — cling to the wall, and in the reef’s network of nooks, crevices and overhangs, we find a channel-clinging crab, cleaner shrimp and a little army of Caribbean spiny lobsters furiously waving their antennae to scare us off. Feather stars and other crinoids are filter-feeding, their delicate symmetrical arms waving in a nearly imperceptible current.

“Look for the macro critters,” Buddy Dive Capt. Gus Bernard told us during our briefing. “Frogfish, seahorses and shrimp, but you might also see barracuda cruising by and a moray eel or two.”

We fan out along the wall, each of us intent on finding the tiniest denizens of this massive underwater volcanic peak. Bernard is our keen-eyed fish and critter guide — he finds the channel-clinging crab and cranky lobsters, and patiently waits for the photographers in the group to get their photos and start finning again. We spend the entire dive poking around, moving about as fast as a clock on Friday afternoon when you’ve got a big weekend planned.

The snail’s pace is perfect for this site in Soufriere Bay, a marine reserve whose waters are cupped by the headland of Scott’s Head Peninsula. As we motored into the bay earlier, the boat hugging the peninsula side, Bernard points out a small cannon — the ruins here are all that remain of the 1760s fort built by the man whose name pops up on a number of dive sites, the British officer George Scott.

Scott took part in a significant chapter in the island’s history, leading the British invasion force that wrestled Dominica from the French. But it is Mother Nature that played an even bigger role in shaping this Eastern Caribbean island, northernmost of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles chain. To appreciate Dominica’s natural beauty is to understand its fiery, explosive beginning, visible in Scott’s Head Peninsula, which is the rim of an ancient caldera. When you dive on a wall or pinnacle here, you’re on the flanks of that primordial volcano.

The island was thrust upward from the 2,000-foot-deep seafloor by cataclysmic forces that could rival any Hollywood end-of-the-world special effects. In this case, the violent upheaval caused by two colliding tectonic plates — about 26 million years ago — didn’t signal apocalyptic destruction; instead, it gave birth to one of the prettiest islands on Earth.

Dominica is the youngest island in the entire Caribbean basin (Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million years). The famous vaporshrouded Boiling Lake, in Morne Trois Pitons National Park’s Valley of Desolation, various gurgling sulfuric springs, and steam-hissing pools and vents are evidence that the island still has a molten heart, though it’s been thousands of years since there was any sort of volcanic eruption. The lava-forged and rainforested sea cliffs, ridges, ravines and valleys that are so beloved by visiting hikers are mirrored underwater. Eons ago, it must’ve been quite a show.

Pinnacle Paradise

A look at a Dominica dive-site map shows that there’s diving all along the island’s western coast, but the southwestern end is freckled by a greater number of dive-flag markers. We’ll have to save the northern and central coast diving for another visit; this week all our diving is concentrated in and around Soufriere Bay and off the knob of land called Scott’s Head. It is the pinnacles, here in the bay and outside it where the Atlantic mixes it up with the Caribbean, that are among Dominica’s most dramatic dives.

Divers can explore the shallow reefs that line the rim of the caldera or drop down on its volcanic flanks for a deeper profile. Many of the dive sites are just off the scalloped coastline near the village of Soufriere (the Catholic church here is lovely to photograph). Operators also take divers to the sites bunched around Scott’s Head Peninsula, and outside the bay, west of the headland, to sites like Scott’s Head Pinnacle and Cashacrou.

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Beginning at Scott’s Head Drop-Off is a good introduction to Dominica’s dive slate, and it’s a little like coming up from the subway onto a Manhattan sidewalk: There’s so much stuff to see in a small chunk of real estate that you could spend an entire dive camped out on just one 10- foot section of the wall. But just like being in a city surrounded by towering skyscrapers when you neglect to look up and get some perspective, it’s easy to forget to take your nose out of all the little nooks and crannies to look out into the blue and register the size of this seamount.

I swim out a bit from the wall and take in as much of the seascape as I can. Both right and left, up and down, the wall stretches seemingly forever, the colorful fish- and sponge-laden reef unfolding like the field of brilliant-red poppies in The Wizard of Oz. In fact, everywhere you look in Dominica, underwater or topside, the island’s natural riches — all relatively unexploited — are in abundant, dazzlingly beautiful supply. In the rainforest, Sisserou parrots, orchids, hummingbirds and fruit trees will overwhelm all your senses; in the ocean, you’ll be similarly inundated by tropical fish, seahorses, turtles and, if you’re very lucky, a passing humpback or sperm whale.

For now, we’re content with the small creatures and our unhurried tour of the site. We off-gas in the shallows, a delightful safety stop where we’re all drawn to yellowhead jawfish dancing over their holes. We reluctantly begin our ascent to end the dive.

“I could dive here every day — there’s so much to see,” Bernard says, as he noses the boat north to Soufriere Pinnacles. “Besides, I’m still looking for Scott’s head.” We all groan at the joke, but he’s right. You could be taken to this site multiple times and never get bored.

Another favorite site is Soufriere Pinnacles, just south of the village of Soufriere, where we keep it relatively shallow by dropping down into a depression in the reef that Bernard calls “Fish Bowl” because it’s usually filled with reef tropicals. Though it’s fairly quiet, we encounter an army of sergeant majors madly charging us in an attempt to keep us from their egg patches, purple smears plastered everywhere on the reef. I am always amazed by the heroics of these damselfish, usually about 6 inches long: The males guard the egg patches until they hatch, and they’re fearless, even when inspected by a bunch of bubble-blowing divers.

The next day, we dive oft-requested Scott’s Head Pinnacle, a current-swept peak just beyond Soufriere Bay. The dive is sometimes started at a sculpted formation called Swiss Cheese, which is home to a swim-through often packed with soldierfish and grunts. You then cross a low-profile reef to the pinnacle. But this day, we begin by descending on the pinnacle itself. As we off-gas at the end of the dive, we make a safety stop on a shallow reef so crammed with life, it is worth a one-hour dive by itself.

When we dive Dangleben’s Pinnacles, Bernard leads us on a meandering tour of the five seamounts that are clustered together. Sponges, gorgonians and corals are gathered like bouquets in a floral shop; huge, decades-old barrel sponges are crowned by crinoids that look like they’ve been kissed by the sun. Some trumpetfish are out on the prowl, and we end on a sand flat that looks like a condo village for garden eels.

Another don’t-miss dive is L’Abym or La Sorciere, just off Soufriere. Floating along the wall, Bernard suddenly turns to the group and grabs imaginary reins, as if riding an underwater horse. A tiny seahorse! The site is enjoying great visibility, and the photographers spend much of the dive taking turns getting pics of this shy critter, nearly as small as my pinky nail.

In the Shallows

The famed site Champagne is another reminder of Mother Nature’s hand in creating this eco-paradise. This is the northernmost site in the marine reserve. It would be a rather nondescript slab of reef, except it bubbles, burbles and shimmers with gases emanating from a multitude of vents in the seafloor. It’s a little bit like swimming in a gigantic flute of champagne. To add to the allure of this wonderland is a cannon that’s embedded in a nearby reef, all that’s left of a 17th-century ship that apparently sank here.

It is on another dive, a peaceful drift that we begin at Coral Gardens just yards off the beach at Point Guignard, that we see evidence of Mother Nature’s more-recent, mercurial handiwork. Broken-off sponges are scattered about, and the viz is hazy; grains of sand are suspended above the reef. Our visit was in October 2015, just two months after Tropical Storm Erika lashed the island with punishing winds and rain.

“Point Guignard was the most affected site,” says Simon Walsh, managing director of Images Dominica. “The yellow sponges are coming back already, but being so close to the mudslides here had an impact.”

The Night of the Storm

On our second day on the island, the sky is nickel-plated by clouds, and the rain comes in fits and starts, though never the frog-drowning downpours that frequently visit the island’s interior rainforests. The moody sky is just enough to prompt people to talk about Erika, a fierce storm that struck the island on August 26, 2015.

“We haven’t seen anything like it since [Hurricane] David in 1979,” Jennifer Carlisle, a security guard at Roseau’s Fort Young Hotel, tells me. “It was really heartbreaking. I shed tears for my countrymen. We won’t forget Erika. Ever.”

Buddy Dive Dominica’s dive operations manager Niels Noteboom knew something was wrong when the storm woke him in the early-morning hours. “I had no phone and no electricity,” he said. “I wanted to check the shop, so I got in my car and drove about 300 feet when I hit about 5 feet of mud covering the road. I turned around, left my car at home and started walking. The road was covered in mud, rocks, parts of homes, power lines — it normally takes about 45 minutes for me to walk; it took me three hours that morning.”

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At the time of our visit, much of the infrastructure, including Melville Hall Airport, was in the process of being rebuilt or had been repaired. Fort Young Hotel, where we stayed, was finishing up its renovation of a handful of rooms, but the restaurant and the dive shop were fully operational. As we went to press, even more progress had been made.

“Isle of Beauty, Isle of Splendour” is the popular title for the national anthem of Dominica: “Toil with hearts and hands and voices. / We must prosper! Sound the call / In which ev’ryone rejoices/ ‘All for Each and Each for All.’” It seems especially appropriate now, as islanders continue to rebuild, surrounded by a beauty that rivals that of any island on Earth.

The morning Jennifer Carlisle and I chat about Erika, a rainbow pierces the charcoal-smudged clouds. We both look skyward, and as the sunlight filters through, Carlisle says: “We are a small country, but we are resilient. And there is always hope.”

The island might have been dealt a setback by Erika, but just a few weeks later, Dominica shines with natural splendor. As one resident told me, “This is paradise — the storm did not change that.”

WHALE WATCHING IN DOMINICA

The whales are nowhere to be found the afternoon we book a trip with Anchorage Hotel and Dive Center, but there’s so much to love about Passion — the luxury sailing catamaran the operator uses for its whale-watching excursions — that it’s hard to be disappointed. Sperm whales are common off Dominica from October to March; in addition to Physeter macrocephalus, you may spot a number of other whale and dolphin species.

“We look for them while they are resting near the surface,” says general manager Andrew Armour during our briefing. “The sperm whale pods are smaller in the Caribbean than in other parts of the world, but the grandmothers, mothers and daughters live together for life, so you’ll find them in groups.”

The crew periodically drops a hydrophone into the water to listen for the clicks the whales make.

While we were skunked this trip, I was luckier on my previous visit. An encounter is truly one of Dominica’s largest gifts.

Make this trip happen with [Buddy Dive Dominica](http://www.buddydivedominica.com/).

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