INDepth – Egyptian shore diving

Nuweiba

You really experience the wilderness of the Sinai when you travel to the port town of Nuweiba, a two-hour drive from Sharm El Sheikh. It’s a desert backwater where shore diving is the norm, and local operator African Divers has got it down to a fine art.

My favourite dives here all take place close to a Multinational Forces and Observers (MFO) camp. There are plenty of resorts with house reefs along this coast: if you like a swanky room, consider Swisscare, which puts its guests in huge suites for the price of an average hotel room.

The pipeline is part of a defunct desalination plant that operated during the era of the Israeli occupation. To be accurate, there are actually two pipelines: their hard metal surfaces have provided a base for 30 years of coral growth, and the site has accumulated all manner of residents. The most obvious tenants are the beefy-looking lionfish that lurk in the shadows, but look closely and you will also find scorpionfish, pepper morays and evil-looking stonefish.

The adjacent reef is worth a dive all to itself, as it is home to several frogfish, including a juvenile the size of a tennis ball, which has been christened ‘Frances’ by Sarah Pikarski of African Divers (Sarah would name every fish on the reef if she had the time). I would never have found the little fella on my own, but Sarah knows the reef intimately and is adept at finding froggies and other critters, if only so that she can give them weirdly inappropriate names. I was even more amazed when Sarah managed to pinpoint a juvenile shrimpfish, which is the size of a grain of rice and looks like a tiny shard of seagrass bobbing in the shallows.

In the same general area as the pipeline is an even stranger artefact from the Israeli occupation – the Sinker. This is possibly the area’s most famous dive: a big mooring buoy that was placed by the Israelis in water with a depth of 35m, unfortunately with a 25m mooring chain. As is so often the way, a maritime cock-up plus time equals a great dive site. The chains are overgrown with scarlet soft corals, and in summer the upper sections of the buoy teem with glassfish, the greatest formation swimmers in Sinai. By the end of October jacks and lionfish have mostly devoured the glassfish, but the nearby reef is an acknowledged classic for critter hunting.

Dahab

I only recently visited Dahab for the first time, but I was lucky to be in the company of Ahmed Nubi, a dive guide from Nesima Resort, who has spent hours on this site.

Sheltered from the prevailing winds in the north end of Dahab Bay, this beach dive is so easy that it gets used as a training site. It starts with the sort of sandy slope that most people just swim over without looking around, but Ahmed managed to turn up a pair of Pegasus sea moths, weird little fish that blend perfectly with the sea bed and are very difficult to spot, let alone photograph.

We ventured into deeper water, where patches of reef provided vibrant oases in the sand. Little humbug damsels flitted in and out of clumps of Acropora coral, while lionfish slumbered under rocky ledges, waiting for the light to fade before unfurling their fins for the afternoon hunt.

Ahmed has an uncanny knack for spotting normally elusive reef creatures from great distances – several times, he pointed at some distant portion of reef, and I would have to move forward several metres before I could make out whatever eel, or octopus, or miniscule juvenile fish, had caught his attention. Now, Ahmed’s reputation was at stake, because he had been foolish/confident enough to utter the word ‘seahorse’ the night before in relation to this dive. Ah, seahorses – so lovely when you manage to find them, so annoying when they remain elusive. Ahmed had said that the seagrass flats at Lighthouse had grown over a much larger area in the 2009 season, and this had led to more seahorse sightings.

Our little group began scouring the seagrass. It’s a fairly monotonous environment – you see the same species of sand goby every few metres, with the false alarm of a pipefish (related to the seahorse, but lacking its kudos as a ‘spot’) every 15 minutes or so. After an hour had passed, I despaired of ever finding the elusive hippocampus, and resorted to chasing a shy boxfish around with my camera. At last, Ahmed raised his hand in triumph. More precisely, he was raising three fingers, because the jammy dodger had found three seahorses and had saved them up to tell us in one go. A great dive guide, certainly, but also a showman. 

El Kaf, Quseir

It is possible to carry out this dive from the comfort of a boat, but it’s more of an adventure to approach it from the shore. The entry point is just 200m off the coastal route, about seven miles south of Quseir. The idea is to enter the water and then swim across the lagoon towards a diver-sized cut in the reef.

After passing through the cut, follow the wall to your right and you come to a pinnacle of hard coral that is normally teeming with bright red anthias. From here, head in a southerly direction (reef on your right) and you should enter a labyrinth of caves and tunnels. Part of the allure of this site is not knowing what may be waiting for you around the next corner.

Admittedly, the primary attraction is the topography, but it’s also a great site for fish-spotting: I use El Kaf as a photographic studio for snapping blue-spotted stingrays, batfish and, lurking on the sea bed, the sinister crocodilefish.

As with most of the sites here, El Kaf is at its most beautiful in the afternoon, when fish activity steps up a gear in the run-up to dusk. I used to have difficulty finding my way back from this site, but it’s simply a question of picking your way past the various tunnels and coral bommies until they bring you back to the cut that serves as an entry point.

The maximum attainable depth is about 40m, but in reality you shouldn’t need to venture much below 18m, and the site is suitable for novices. I recommend it as a longish third dive of the day – if you’re good on your air, you should be able to while away a mellow 90 minutes on this site. But do make sure the surface cover knows your plan.

The Canyon, Taba

The northernmost Red Sea resort area in Egypt, Taba is known for its critters – from the cryptic frogfish to the beautiful pyjama nudibranch. The Canyon is, strictly speaking, half a canyon – the coral forming a ledge on one side that gives way to a sandy-bottomed gulley. It’s a favourite for divers staying at the Taba Hilton: all you need to do is load your kit up on a big trolley and wheel it along the five-minute walk to the entry point.