Rosemond's Trench - Anse La Raye & the Central West Coast, Saint Lucia

Site Overview

Rosemond's Trench is the oddest and most beloved dive on the central west coast - not a reef, not a wall, but a geological fault line that has split the seabed open into a miniature canyon system, a maze of narrow, vertical-walled fissures and sand-floored trenches that run for a few hundred metres through the shallows off Anse La Raye and top out at only ten metres. It is as if someone took a knife to the reef and opened a set of underwater back streets, and the effect on divers is immediate: you slip over the lip, drop into the first trench and suddenly the open reef is above you on both sides and you are swimming a sheltered, sunbeam-striped corridor of encrusted rock. That confinement is the point. The trench walls are thick with life that the rest of the coast has but never shows so conveniently - seahorses hitched in the overhangs, camouflaged anglerfish posing on the walls, cuban solenocytes and goldring butterflies tucked in the corners, morays, crabs, shrimps, flatworms and, on the right wall in the right week, the legendary nightshipworm. Because the whole system sits in ten metres of flat, sheltered water, the site has become the island's photography camp - macro devotees hover in the beams for an hour at a time, and the guides have an almost supernatural knack for reading the rock. For a beginner, it is a wonderland without hazard; for a photographer, it is the densest half-hour of small life on the island.