The Mantas

Beyond The Reef offers a daily dive trip to the famous mantas. As you can see from the photos, the visibility starts off clear, but diminshes as the tidal flow moves seaward during the dive. We plan our dive trips to get the best visibility, but the dive sites are influenced by the tides. If you're heading to Yap, you can email us to find out when the best visibility will be for any given month. Day after day and year after year of diving with the mantas has taught us how to run the best manta dive trips.

Although we cannot guarantee seeing mantas, the chance of seeing them is quite high and most divers coming to Yap see at least one manta, and often times more than thirty during a week-long visit. Obviously, the more days you plan to dive in Yap to see mantas, the better the odds.

We ask all of our guests to follow our guides' instructions, for everyone to have the best possible manta experience. While sitting patiently on the bottom near the cleaning stations, divers can watch these rays as they get cleaned by the wrasses. The mantas will approach divers cautiously but frequently come within inches of our guests. The smaller groups sizes helps ensure everyone diving with Beyond The Reef "gets a front row seat" for the action.

From mid-November through mid-May, we dive in Miil Channel, on the northwestern side of the island. Travelling to this site takes us through the scenic German Channel, a mangrove -lined waterway that bisects the main island. From-mid May through mid-November, we can also dive in another channel called Valley of tyhe Rays, which is on the northeatern side.

We ask all divers visiting Yap not to touch or chase our mantas, as we want to simply observe and photograph these majestic animals and not harass or frighten them in any way. Diving with our mantas is a pretty awesome experience, and ranks up there as one of the world's top dives.