the Basses

Roughly ten kilometres off Sri Lanka's southeast coast, marked by the Great and Little Basses lighthouses, lies the Basses Ridge — a limestone reef system stretching nearly 40 kilometres, the last barrier between the island and the open Indian Ocean all the way to Antarctica.

It's also the site of one of Sri Lanka's most famous real-life shipwreck discoveries. In 1961, the science fiction author and diver Arthur C. Clarke, who made Sri Lanka his home, discovered the wreck of a 17th-century ship scattered with silver coins on the Great Basses Reef — an event he later wrote about in his book The Treasure of the Great Reef.

Diving conditions here are the most demanding in Sri Lanka: strong currents, powerful surge and open-ocean swell breaking over the ridge make this a serious adventure-diving destination, rewarded with dramatic limestone formations and rich, rarely-disturbed reef life. The dive window is short and precise — roughly mid-March to mid-April, the brief inter-monsoonal calm between the west and east coast seasons.

The Basses isn't a region for a first dive trip, but for experienced divers chasing something genuinely wild, it's one of the most memorable dive sites in the Indian Ocean.