Le Sport - Rodney Bay & Pigeon Island - Northern Coast, Saint Lucia

Site Overview

Le Sport is the island's seahorse address - a coral reef system draped in soft coral and towering gorgonian sea fans off the northern coast, and the single most reliable place in Saint Lucia to find the tiny, curled-tailed fish that underwater photographers travel the world to photograph. Guides work the gardens here slowly and by torch, reading the sea fans and sponge stands the way a birdwatcher reads a hedgerow, and the patient diver who hovers and trusts the guide is rewarded with lined seahorses clinging to the swaying fans and, on a good day, the almost impossibly small dwarf seahorse hitched to a soft-coral polyp where no unaided eye would ever have found it. But the site's charm runs well beyond its famous residents: the whole shallow reef between 5 and 18 metres is a soft-coral garden in gentle current, waving with sea fans and sponge, humming with angelfish, butterflyfish and parrotfish, and hiding morays, crabs, shrimps and every manner of cryptic small life in its branches. Because the water is sheltered, warm and current-light, Le Sport is as comfortable for a newer diver as it is compelling for a macro obsessive - a slow, shallow, hands-off naturalist dive where the payoff is measured in centimetres and in the quiet thrill of a guide's torch beam settling, at last, on a seahorse.