As a professional diver, I sometimes get asked what are my favourite dive destinations. Here they are in no particular order.

1. The Maldives

The best way to dive the Maldives is on a live-aboard boat: you can do up to four dives each day and it works out good value. From June until October you are almost guaranteed to see manta rays but they are there the rest of the year as well. North Male Island and South Ari Island provide reliably good diving around the atoll walls, with large numbers of [sharks] and schooling game fish as well as all the small colourful reef life you expect to see. The Maldives still has the best all-round diving in the Indian Ocean, and to me the journey starts the moment I speedboat ride to the dive boat].

2. Osprey Reef Queensland, Australia

As one of the most incredible dive sites on the planet. Offering a diverse population of sharks of shark life] all year round and pristine hard coral untouched by tourist hordes before]. North Horn site is well known for its resident school of White tip reef sharks. It has also been a shark feeding site for almost 20 years. The silvertip shark, moray eels and many smaller species are familiar with humans. Undersea Explorer now study the sharks, they are monitored periodically. A underwater amplitheatre allows divers to sit up to 20m deep to view the feeding frenzy. View blacktip reef sharks, blue sharks, silvertips and Maori Wrasse. Large soft coral trees deep on the Western wall. Fantastic pelagic action, such as rainbow runners and giant Travellies .See nautilus and crabs. Departing from Cairns or Port Douglas , some dive companies also visit Osprey Reef in their Great Barrier Reef Liveaboard Scuba Diving Trips.

3.Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos, Bahamas

Located along the southern tip of the Bahamas, Grand Turk is almost always sheltered from heavy currents and visibility is great anytime for scuba diving. Grand Turk is a summer meeting area for giant manta rays. Grand Turk is surrounded by walls covered in hard corals, starting at 25 feet and rising to 30 feet then dropping 7000 feet straight down.

4. The Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea

I happen to like coral and sponges and sea slugs and all the weirdly shaped micro-creatures that crawl, slither and hop along the reefs. That is why I love the “fertile triangle” of the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG), where marine biodiversity is the highest on the planet. Getting to PNG from Europe is a long slog, and once in Port Moresby you need to fly on to New Britain Island, but the diving makes up for it. Night diving on the offshore sea mounts rising from the abyss in the Bismarck Sea cured me of my fear of being in the sea at night. Apart from the big stuff, you will see squat lobsters and sponge crabs, dwarf scorpion fish and pygmy seahorses. Some of the best shore diving in the world is accessible from the Walindi Plantation Resort in Kimbe Bay, where biologists have identified more than 800 marine species.

5. Surin and Similan Islands, Thailand

Located near the line on the map between Thai and Burmese waters lie a group of islands in the Andaman Sea. There is an element of “wilderness diving” hereabouts and a huge choice of rarely visited dive sites. At Koh Bon, the pinnacle rises from the ocean depths and attracts groups of schooling pelagic-fish as well as whale sharks. Richelieu Rock is a similarly unique site, famous among experienced divers for the amazing amount of macro-life inhabiting its coral.