Saba

I dived in Saba in October 2005. Many things make this island unique. Saba is actually an 870-meter-high dormant volcano, Mt Scenery. The village of Windwardside, where most hotels, restaurants, shops and dive shops are located, is at an altitude of 600 meters above sea level, which means that every diver has to climb to this altitude after coming back from a day of deep diving. The population of Saba is around 1400 people and includes almost 300 medical students attending the Saba University of Medicine, where the hyperbaric chamber is located. The airport is rated by many pilots as the most dangerous in the world, as it has the world's shortest commercial runway, with a length of 400 meters and surrounded by cliffs and the ocean, so airplane landings and takeoffs are very dramatic. The 11-minute flight back to St Maarten is done at an altitude of 600 meters because the pilot is well aware that every passenger in the plane is a diver still in the no-fly-time. I flew only 4.5 hours after I finished my last of five dives in two days... well, right after diving I had to take a shower and check out from my hotel room at an altitude of 600 meters anyway... Underwater visibility was about 25 meters and water temperature was 29-31°C on all dives, which were between 22 and 37 meters deep and above the average for the Caribbean.