Anse Galet - Anse La Raye & the Central West Coast, Saint Lucia

Site Overview

Anse Galet is the central west coast's easy, sunlit overture - a sheltered cove of large, well-developed coral heads standing in six to nine metres of bathwater, so shallow, so calm and so thick with familiar reef life that it functions at once as a beginner dive, a training ground, a refresher site and the rare location where the divers on air and the family with masks get the same reef on the same morning. The bay's boulder-and-coral garden is classic Caribbean postcard work: massive brain and star coral heads furred with colour, sand channels threading between them, clouds of sergeant majors and French grunt hanging off every bommie, queen angelfish and stoplight parrotfish grazing the faces, and the steady background traffic the west coast is known for - green turtles cropping up over the heads, morays draped from holes, lobsters stacked in the shade and, on lucky days, a nurse shark or a southern stingray bedded under an overhang. There is no drama here and none is wanted: Anse Galet exists to give newer divers, uneasy divers and non-diving partners their piece of Saint Lucia's underwater reef in the gentlest possible form, and for the second-dive slot at the end of a big wall morning, few sites on the coast are more reliably pleasant.