The waters around Zanzibar and Pemba (the sister island) offer divers of all levels (from “discover scuba” diver, through to dive instructors) some of the best diving in the Indian Ocean. There are uninterrupted blueskies and crystal clear waters most of the year, and an amazing diversity of coral reef sites stretching along the whole north, south and east coasts (Zanzibar is after all a coral island). There are established professional PADI and SSI diving clubs (see below) as well as live board boat charters for the most adventurous. The seas around Zanzibar and Pemba offer even the most experienced divers new experiences; frequent whale shark sightings, hammerhead mating grounds in the Pemba channel, swimming with dolphins, giant manta rays, or in a cloud of stingrays. There are also exhilarating drift dives, and coral walls reaching up from apparently bottomless drop offs.

As Zanzibar is still relatively untouched by large scale commercial tourism, the dive sites still offer the abundance of sh and coral life that other areas such as Mombasa can no longer hope to sustain. The waters are not over-shed and remain predominantly undisturbed unlike the more crowded areas of the African coast.