Top 100 2015: Best Visibility

For the 22nd year in a row, our readers weighed in on their favorite dive sites around the world — from North America to the Caribbean and Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans — to bring our 2015 Top 100 Reader's Choice Awards to life.

For variety, we have selected one destination in each region (Caribbean and Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and North America) to write about. Not all selections are the first-place winners in the Best Visibility category for Top 100. For a complete list of Top 100 Readers Choice winners in this category, please scroll down.

BEST VISIBILITY IN THE CARIBBEAN AND ATLANTIC

1. Mexico

2. Cayman Islands

3. U.S. Virgin Islands

4. Turks and Caicos

5. Bahamas

BEST VISIBILITY IN NORTH AMERICA

1. Florida Springs

2. Texas

3. British Columbia

4. California

5. Washington

BEST VISIBILITY IN THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS

1. French Polynesia

2. Red Sea

3. Indonesia

4. Guam

5. Hawaii

Dive instructors in the Yucatan’s Riviera Maya don’t check weather reports. Cenotes are water-filled caverns and caves that are like indoor swimming pools. When you dive a cenote like Chac Mool or Casa Cenote, you’ll enjoy visibility of 200-plus feet. For thousands of years, the water you fin through has been constantly cycling through limestone walls, which act as filters. The cenotes were sacred to the ancient Maya, who believed them to be portholes to the afterlife — don’t go through this life without diving them.

GO NOW: /rivieramaya

Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Creative

U.K. divers know that visibility at Egypt’s Red Sea can be stellar, sometimes limited only by the huge aggregations of sea goldies and glassfish in your way, and during occasional plankton blooms.

GO NOW: /egypt

Tobias Friedrich

U.K. divers know that visibility at Egypt’s Red Sea dive sites like the Giannis D can be stellar, sometimes limited only by the huge aggregations of sea goldies and glassfish in your way, and during occasional plankton blooms.

GO NOW: /egypt

Tobias Friedrich

Ever had a dive where you hold your hand in front of your face and ask yourself, “I am underwater, right?” That’s not an uncommon sensation at Florida’s hundreds of springs, where the crisp, constant 72-degree water provides an invigorating environment to explore all that’s suddenly so clear to you.

GO NOW: /florida

Ellen Cuylaerts