Cold water ... Row & Be Damned, Quadra Island B.C.
Why? Because it's a wall that's so covered with life that you literally cannot see the substrate. Massive colonies of strawberry anemones compete for space with tubeworms, sponges, corals, and zoanthids on every inch of surface. Living among all that are so many species of fish, crab, nudibranch, starfish, and other inverterbrates that you can't remember all the different species you'll see on a given dive.
This wall is so alive because of the stiff currents that sweep through Discovery Passage every day. Diving the wall at slack gives you a new appreciation for the term. You put in at one end, descend, and let the current take you for a ride. At some point, either in time or depth, you'll change direction and sweep back the other way. If conditions are right, you'll do switchbacks at 10-20 foot depth intervals as you make your way up the wall. It's sensory overload in multiple ways ... and will leave you with a severe case of WOW.
Warm water ... Tulamben, Bali. Put in at the beach in front of Paradise Villa and enjoy a three-course banquet. Go right and you get a spectacular wall, go left and explore the USS Liberty ... a sunken WWII wreck. Go straight out and poke through the beautiful vistas of Coral Garden ... perhaps my all-time favorite night dive. Tons of life in all three places ... from massive gorgonians and soft corals to schools of bump-head parrotfish to the tiny sea critters that hide in the coral heads. It's a photographer's paradise.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
