Les Abymes

Twenty to fifty metres, current, and a stop you do not skip

Town : Le Prêcheur

Les Abymes is number 5 in the register of Martinique sites, off Le Prêcheur, between Anse Belleville and the Abymes jetty. This is the sector of La Perle and Le Sous-Marin, for which we have pages.

The exploration zone runs from twenty to fifty metres, on a wall. Sponges, corals, gorgonians and schools of sardines are found here, and you may meet turtles, lobsters and barracuda. Current is frequent and visibility varies with the season. The minimum level is Level 2.

One detail pleased us while documenting this page: in the club diary, Damien entered this site as Deep, Les Abymes, Level 2 minimum. Public sources give exactly the same minimum. It was not house caution, it is the nature of the site.

The safety stop, and why it is not optional

Three minutes at around five metres, at the end of the dive. It is not a mandatory decompression stop, it is a margin you give yourself.

During the dive, the nitrogen in the air you breathe dissolves into blood and tissue under pressure. On the way up, pressure falls and that nitrogen wants to become gas again. Stopping for a few minutes at the end gives it time to leave quietly through the lungs, instead of forming bubbles where it should not.

What makes it harder here

On a site with current and no bottom reference beneath you, holding five metres for three minutes is far from obvious. It takes real buoyancy control and correct weighting. That is one of the reasons we ask for Level 2 on this site.

Ascent rate counts at least as much as the stop itself: no more than about ten metres a minute, and slower still towards the end. You come up more slowly than your own bubbles.

What level you need here