Although not one of the Caribbean’s top diving destinations, Barbados still offers plenty to enjoy underwater year-round – not least over 200 shipwrecks, and turtles galore. It’s also a great place to learn to dive and the very professional dive shops offer various levels of PADI certification.

The marine park in Carlisle Bay is an inviting place to start. Roughly marked out by old cannons, its sheltered shallow waters contain six wrecks teeming with tropical fish. Reef and wreck conjoin at The Boot, off the South Coast, boasting plenty of turtles and regular sightings of eagle rays. Barracuda Junction on a West-Coast reef, is renowned for large schools of its namesake.

Up near Speightstown the inauspicious-sounding old Cement Works abounds with sea-horses, and is home to the elusive and extraordinary-looking frogfish. More advanced divers head for the Stavronikita; one of the Caribbean’s largest wrecks, it’s a coral-encrusted monster freighter within Folkestone Marine Reserve. Sunk in 1976, it stands upright on the sea-bed.