I snorkeled yesterday and today. It was my first time snorkeling. I feel like I’ve been missing out. I think I’ve avoided it because I’m not a strong swimming and if you put me in a pool I struggle to go more than about twenty meters before I start flailing about, because I’ve never really mastered the “turn your head and breathe” part of swimming.

A lot of snorkeling just seems to be doing a dead man’s float while looking down through your mask and breathing through a snorkel, which it turns out I can do. And most of the time around here you’re either in water that’s less than five feet deep or you’re within a ten meter swim of water that’s shallow enough to stand in. And it turns out I can swim perfectly fine when I don’t have to worry about turning my head to breathe.

Anyway, a couple of staff members told me that the best snorkeling is outside the wedding chapel and Yasmin and around the “first bridge” that connects to the 500 villas. I would agree with that. There are breakwater rocks just outside Yasmeen and the highest concentration of fish I’ve seen is right around the far tip of those rocks and then along those rocks down to the bridge and then past the bridge to the breakwater rocks outside Tasting Table, where there are also some fish in and around the rocks.

Also, my understanding is that these islands the resort sits on are substantially man made. Outside the odd numbered 600 beach villas, there’s shallow water where you can wade out about 20 meters on sand, then 20 more on a rocky ocean floor, before you reach a point where the ocean floor kind of artificially drops off into an abyss along a steep underwater downhill slope. One moment the water is 4 and a half feet deep, but take one more step and it’s twenty feet deep. I’ll call this the “abyss line.”

There tend to be a lot of fish along this abyss line which is located about 40 meters off the odd numbered 600s beach villas. Outside 623-627 is pretty good for fish (again, I don’t know good snorkeling from bad) including the breakwater rocks right outside 627.

From outside Yasmeen, if you swim straight out 15 meters or so from the tip of the breakwater rocks to the abyss line there are a lot of fish there and all along the abyss line to villas 501-505. The line is really only about 15 meters or so out from the decks of the reef villas. It’s kind of hit or miss along this line outside the higher numbered 500s and the 300s all the way to the third bridge just before Le Long, where there’s a staircase from the bridge to the water so you can put in or take out there. I do recall that just off 511, perpendicular with the start of the second bridge, there were a lot of fish, and I think off 307 also.

Anyway, in short, there seems to be some snorkeling potential along the abyss line 15-40 meters outside any of the odd numbered 300, 500, or 600 villas. If I had to choose one spot, especially for novices and non-swimmers who want to be in shallow water, I’d say around the tip of the breakwater rocks outside Yasmin, which is like 15 meters short of the abyss line there where there are also fish.

There is some coral all along the way, but you’ll see more rocks than coral. And again, I don’t know what good snorkeling or bad snorkeling is, I’m just saying an hour or so in the water in these areas and you’ll see many many hundreds to thousands of colorful small and medium sized fish, including the striped black and green fish, the spotted leopard looking fish, those saucer-sized blue fish with the yellow trim, etc.

I haven’t seen any sharks or sea turtles or killer whales or mermaids though.