Marsa Alam airport is busier today, and the transfer to the terminal goes smoothly. Just inside the door is a man with a clip-board marked Oonas and a fistful of visa stamps. While everyone else has to queue I have my passport checked and I’m the first through to the baggage reclaim area, where I find they cling to one great Egyptian tradition with the tenacity of a limpet. Luggage from Gatwick is still placed on the reclaim belt marked Frankfurt. As they have only the one baggage reclaim belt this doesn’t cause too much confusion, even for an elderly nitrogen affected diver such as myself.
As people reclaim their luggage they form into little groups clustered around the tour operator’s reps, and we get our first look at the group of people we’ll spend the next week living and diving with. I’ve one less worry this time, I’ve brought my own buddy with me so I know who I’m diving with. My sister Vicki qualified as a diver a couple of years ago and has been on a couple of liveaboard trips with me before, despite which she’s still willing to dive with me.
The rest of the team look OK as well. There are a four lads from the north-east, a pair from London, a guy from Liverpool and a couple of chaps without discernible regional accents that will need to await classification.
The ride to the boat takes the advertised fifteen minutes and it is immediately obvious that there is a huge amount of building work going on here. Egypt has two great natural resources when it comes to attracting tourists, the Nile with her temples, tombs and pyramids, and the Red Sea. The Nile business is well sorted, and the Egyptians have been welcoming tourists to the sites for the best part of three thousand years. The Red Sea is new. Twenty years ago there was one decent hotel in Hurghada and divers in Sharm slept on the beach. Now there are international hotel chains and resort hotels by the bucketload and you’re spoiled for choice. By next year you’ll have an equally wide choice in Marsa Alam.
The boat looks splendid, and after a welcome drink and a short boat briefing we get the chance to unpack and set up our kit. One of the cam-buckles on my BC breaks. No problem, Aladin, our Egyptian dive guide for the week, re-threads the buckle and I’m happy enough with the temporary repair to forget about it for the rest of the week.
The following morning the sun is bright and hot and we get our permissions to leave the dock nice and early, so we’re first away for the check dive. En-route we meet our other dive-guide for the week, a German lady. The rules about dive guides aboard liveaboard dive boats have been changed recently, and with the potential for twenty guests we need two guides. She gives us a full dive briefing as we make our way to our first dive-site, and then we’re kitted up and in the water for our check-dive at a reef called Abu Dabbab 4.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve done it, but the first dive of a trip is still magical. Within seconds Vicki and I are floating weightless in a cool blue realm populated by a vast number of fantastical creatures. At the start of the dive the contents gauge reads a steady 220bar, but then cools and is rapidly showing just 180bar. From then on the needle swings slowly and unstoppably to the point where we have to surface. Somebody once said that you can never have too much air, and I’m forced to agree every time I dive.
Some people get sniffy about check dives, doing little more than dropping in the water to sort their buoyancy and then having the briefest paddle about before surfacing in anticipation of the first ‘real’ dive of the trip.
Well, guys, this is the Red Sea. You can see almost anything almost anywhere. Abu Dabbab 4 has a sandy bottom at 20m and a series of smallish rock pinnacles covered in marine life. I’ve got a new cameras and Vicki hasn’t dived for a while but it doesn’t take either of us long to sort ourselves out and our hour is over far too soon.
Second dive is at Sha’ab Sharm, a smallish patch reef with sheer sides and plateaus on the north and south tips. We get our first RIB ride out to the north plateau and tumble backward into the water to find ourselves swimming beside a sheer wall. We don’t go very deep, but we stay in the water for 73 fascinating minutes. There are no limits on dive time on most dives and we make the most of the freedom.
Night dives are a wonderful experience. There is nothing to see outside the beam of the torch so your whole concentration narrows down to the bright cone of light and the fabulous colours it sparks into life. Within seconds of reaching the reef wall a pyjama-slug waves me across and poses superbly on the bare tip of a rocky finger. It might not have been the least common nudibranch in the world but I’ve never seen one so beautifully posed. I’d show you the pictures to prove it if only I’d remembered to take the lens cap off my brand new and never been in the water before macro lens.
That night we headed off after dinner on the ten hour steam to St John’s in the deep, deep south. This is the final reef system before Egyptian waters become Sudanese waters and is the final frontier for liveaboard dive-boats.
Our first two dives are at Habili Ali, aka Habili Habibi, a small patch reef with steep walls on the northern side and a relatively gentle slope down on the southern side. Vicki had booked the trip in the firm expectation of seeing sharks. Someone, me , had told her the south Red Sea was the place for sharks and she therefore expected them to put in an appearance. We did two dives at Habili Ali and didn’t see so much as a small white-tip reefy. That made five sharkless dives in total and she wasn’t happy.
For our next two dives we moved within St John’s to a site called Dangerous Reef. I’d dived it before and it was called something else that time, but it’s one of my favourite St John’s dives so it can be called anything you like as long as I can dive it.
There’s a small cave system within the reef and some stunning pillars of rock and coral on the tip of the reef but the most incredible sight of all is a rock in just 6m of water that is covered in anemones and anemone fish. The anemones are half closed to show their brilliant red outsides and the anemone fish swim around in house-proud profusion to make sure you notice.
Still no sharks, mind you. Or on the night dive.
The first dive of day three was at Gota Soraya. We dropped in from the platform of the boat midway along the western side and swam southward around the reef where we found a small cave. To be honest it was more of a depression in the rock with a bit of an overhang, really, but it also had a white-tip reef shark so Vicki wasn’t too bothered about the geology. It was a fair size, too, and we watched it for a few minutes before going closer to taker a picture.
We came up on the far side of the reef and popped up a dive-flag to call a taxi and bobbed happily on the surface as we waited.
Back on the boat we’d finished breakfast when someone shouted they’d seen an Oceanic White-tip shark cruise past. Cue a general rush for masks, fins and snorkels followed by a moment of complete inactivity as everyone realised they were proposing to enter the water and snorkel with what is said to be the fourth most dangerous shark on the planet. Still, they followed me in so that was OK.
There were two sharks, not one, and they were around two to two and a half metres long. We were able to swim with them for a good fifteen minutes. Back on the boat the dive guides said that Oceanics are being seen far more commonly this year than normal, so if you want to see one…
Vicki was now happy, having seen not just a namby-pamby reef shark but a proper open water killer that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a documentary, so when we moved to Habili St John’s Wood for the second dive and didn’t see another she wasn’t unhappy.
The third dive was at Cave Reef. This is a shallow reef system that is full of caves. Who says dive guides have no imagination when it comes to naming reefs? We had a maximum depth of 10m and were limited to a bottom time of 60 minutes as we were making our way back north by this time and had some long steams between sites.
The next three hours were entertaining. We had to head north, and the wind and waves were against us. The skipper had his foot down and we hammered through seas that weren’t really very big but still threw spray right over the top of the boat, and she had four deck levels above the water. I spent a fair bit of the journey cradling my camera in case it got thrown about. Yes, I know I had my eyes closed, but I wasn’t sleeping, I was looking after the camera.
Our night dive site was the island of Sernaka, where a lovely but camera shy banded boxer-shrimp kept me entertained for almost half an hour. When I looked around after failing to get a decent shot I found a queue of frustrated photographers behind me.
Day four started at Erg Abu Diab and continued at Abu Galawa Kebir where we dived the little wreck of a tugboat, the Tienstin, that sank a long while ago. The wreck sits upright and intact with her bow breaking the surface and her stern in twenty metres of water. All the wood has long gone, but her steel structure is intact and her triple expansion engines in full sight. With care it is possible to squeeze into her engine and boiler room, but the whole wreck is so completely covered in hard coral that from the outside it’s tough to work out where the wreck ends and where the reef begins.
Third dive was at Sha’ab Sheleniat, which means Coin Reef. The tips of the small reeflets off the main reef look like coins thrown onto the blue surface of the water. In the water were fantastic numbers of small reef fish of all sorts, and some fish species I’ve never registered seeing before. I was in snap-happy heaven and barely moved for the whole of the dive.
Finally we night-dived at Wadi Gamal Dahara, which is a perfect sleeping spot with a long reef for shelter and nothing behind that could hinder the boat moving off in the dark.
The next morning we did indeed leave early, and made our first dive at Sha’ab Sharm, this time going much deeper on the northern tip, before crossing to Elphinstone.
Elphinstone is a long, narrow blade of reef with stepped plateaus at the north and south ends and a resident hammerhead population. It’s said to be one of the best dives in the Egyptian Red Sea, and that makes it, by definition, one of the best dives in the world.
We had two superb dives here, with some of our group seeing the promised hammerheads and bringing back video to prove it, but my lasting memory of this place is the amount of life and the brilliant colours of the corals and the fish along the sheer walls. Oh, and the pair of Oceanic White-Tip sharks we snorkelled with between dives. They were bigger than the first pair, fully loaded with pilot fish and entirely scary.
The following day was the last. We began at Elphinstone and went deep off the northern plateau, but again the brilliant golden sparkle of anthias against the deep blue of the open water are what I remember best.
Our final two dives were at Sha’ab Shuna, a completely different site to any we’d seen before. The place is a small bay on the coast, with broken rocks for walls and a broad patch of sea-grass in the middle of the bay. The fish life on the walls was superb, and there was the chance of a dugong on the sea-grass. We saw a playful octopus but no dugong and then it was all over.
For the last day we transferred to a local hotel, where day rooms had been arranged for us, and we were all able to reflect on the week we’d just enjoyed.
It had been excellent. The best testament to any trip has to be if you’d go back. I’ve dived the deep south four times now, and I’d go back tomorrow!
