Bassas Da India Inside out, A Guide to your Desired Location. Beauty of Unknown Paradise.

A Book on Bassas Da India. Naturally, when hearing about a special place that is one of the top five wild diving sites in the world, you would think that this would be in one of these far flung places.

Yet we now have a special place for you relatively close to home - Bassas Da India. This is not far away at all but the two day sail to the middle of the Mozambique Channel makes this a very special and remote destination.

Bassas Da India is a submerged volcanic atoll which rises up from 3 000m to break the surface on low tide in the middle of the Mozambique Channel. The atoll was first recorded by Portuguese explorers in the early sixteenth century and was named Baixo da Judia (Shoal of Judia), after the name of a Portuguese ship that ran aground there.

The name later became Bassas Da India due to transcription errors by cartographers. This is a well known graveyard to nearly 100 shipwrecks where many came to their peril in what was thought to be deep ocean in the middle of nowhere.

On high tide all but a few small boulder-like jagged rocks can be seen as well as the only two visible wrecks of the many ships that met their destiny here. Without these references at high tide many more ships could possibly have met their peril.