Make no bones about it—there is no quick and easy way to get there. Despite being in the same hemisphere as my home in Toronto, getting to Dominica proved to be a full-day expedition. Arriving at the airport at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, there was no queue and I was at the gate in 20 minutes flat. Fortunately, I squeaked through Air Canada’s stringent new carry-on baggage limitations. To ensure there were no hassles, I stuffed my pockets with batteries, cords and chargers to play it safe!

Dominica is the youngest of the Caribbean islands and is flanked by Guadeloupe to the north and Martinique to the south, which are both French colonies. Inevitably, many of the locals speak a derivative of a French, Carib and West African creole known as Kwéyòl.

 

Ancestors of the original Carib Indians, the Kalinago still live by traditional fishing and farming methods and are rather distinctive in appearance, resembling South American Amazon tribes and are much shorter in stature.

The sperm whale is the canonical whale, its form immortalized by books and drawings centuries old. When you ask a child to draw a whale, it is likely that what will come out of her developing mind most likely resembles a sperm whale, an animal with a huge, box-like head and tiny pectoral fins whose evolution seems to defy logical explanation.

St Lucia is a maturing package tourist destination, with well established dive schools offering multi-lingual instruction and guidance for both beginner and experienced divers; Dominica is a nature tourist’s idyllic location offering more adventurous dives and above water scenery that is equally as spectacular as that below water; St Vincent, on the other hand, has become known as the “muck diving critter capital of the Caribbean”—a photographer’s dream offering a diversity of species that rivals Lembeh Straights in Indonesia, but with one difference: these are Caribbean species, and many c