North of Gili Trawangan
Halik
One reef, two dives: a coral garden in the shallows and the ridges in the deep.
North of Gili Trawangan
One reef, two dives: a coral garden in the shallows and the ridges in the deep.
Halik is the site people mean when they say the Gilis still have good coral. It runs along the north side of Gili Trawangan and it is really two dives stacked on top of each other, chosen on the day by depth and by who is in the water.
The shallow half, between five and fifteen metres, is a coral garden: anemones and clownfish, octopus tucked into the rubble, catfish, and a small cave where juvenile sharks rest up.
Go deeper and the reef turns into ridges and canyons running out from twenty-five to thirty metres, punctuated by barrel sponges and gorgonian fans. This is where the reef sharks patrol — black-tips and white-tips — with sweetlips, blue-spotted stingrays and thick schools of snapper holding in the lee of the ridges.
What you come for
The coral garden sits comfortably inside the eighteen-metre Open Water limit, so newly certified divers get the best of the shallow reef. The ridges are at twenty-five to thirty metres and belong to Advanced divers.
Because the two profiles are so different, Halik is one of the few sites on this list genuinely worth diving twice.
Halik is a drift site and the current can run medium to strong. That is part of the design: the ridges are shaped by it, and the fish stack up along them because of it.
Around the full moon, bumphead parrotfish come through here. It is not a schedule you can book against, but it is a real pattern and the crew watch for it.
Never promised, never scheduled. Mantas, mola mola and whale sharks are not resident in the Gili Islands — when they turn up it is luck, and we would rather you dived here for the reef.
The same for every site on this list.
Diving works all year here. April to October is the dry season and gives the clearest water, with September, October, May and June the sweet spot; July and August are the busiest. November to March brings plankton and less visibility, and with it a better chance of something big passing through.
Small groups, four divers to a guide, and a crew that picks the site by the conditions rather than the timetable. Message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you what the water is doing today.
Book on WhatsAppEvery site on this page is dived from Gili Air, most of them within a fifteen-minute boat ride.
