The best of Egypt's offshore dive sites - in a week

For those in search of adventure, Egypt’s offshore islands offer coral walls, wrecks and a good chance of shark action. The upper-end liveaboards plying these waters have a great deal to offer, but the challenge is covering the distances between the most famous sites. We were on board M/S Royal Evolution, whose owner Yasser El Moafi said it could make the Brothers-St John’s run comfortably in a week. Powered by twin 38,000cc engines, the vessel can cruise at a pacey 12 knots, covering the 450 nautical miles in long, sustained bursts of speed. Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable, but with the new generation of steel-hulled vessels, a choppy passage needn’t hinder your pleasure.

While the Evolution could handle the waves at Elphinstone, the divers could not, so ambitions to dive the exposed northern point were quashed and the divers had to content themselves with a sedate drift along the wall, famous for its soft corals and billowing schools of anthias. I had hoped to run into some oceanic white-tip sharks here, but according to dive guides Simon Gardner and Ali Baba, sightings have not been so frequent this year.

We motored overnight to Big Brother, sailing into waves big enough to repeatedly lift a 39m steel vessel out of the water. It was an uneasy night’s sleep, but I’ve been in similar seas in a wooden boat half the size, where abject fear kept the seasickness at bay. The next morning saw the northerly winds receding, and we were able to get onto the north point and find the picturesque wreck of the container ship, Numidia, which lies along the sloping reef, its structure still solid enough to explore inside, yet completely colonised by corals, sponges and anemones. It’s the most beautiful of wrecks, and even if someone managed to dislodge one of its famous rolling stock wheels recently, there are still two sets to admire in the shallow part of the dive.

The brief crossing to Little Brother was made that night, all the better for an early morning dive on the north point. Hammerhead, grey reef and thresher sharks were all seen off the deep sections, but they were deeper still, hanging a good 25–30m deeper and appearing only as flickering shadows on the limits of visibility. After lunch I was brooding over the Red Sea’s ‘shy shark syndrome’, when the cry went up ‘Oceanic under the boat!’ While the others watched from the sundeck, I slipped into my dive kit, grabbed my camera and yelled up at the dive guide, Ali Baba ‘Ali – permission to dive?’ Ali, himself something of a legend in the Red Sea, leaped down the steps and ushered me towards the dive platform, with these words: ‘It’s not an oceanic – it’s a whale shark!’

It was one of those perfect Brothers ‘happenings’, an ultra-friendly young male whale shark, perhaps only 4.5m long but seemingly unbothered by the mass of snorkellers who accompanied it. It was circling between the liveaboards, staying at the surface and moving slowly enough for everyone to keep up. Looking up from the serenity of 8m, it was a frenetic scene; with so many people determined to make the most of a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experience. Swimmers were bumping into each other as they jostled for position or surfaced violently after carrying out a hasty duck dive. Credit to most of them, they allowed the shark a bit of space and it continued to circle, despite a few excitable types who tried to ride it by grabbing the dorsal fin.

Fin-grabbing is a mistake, as it almost always causes the shark to dive and depart, but this one was extraordinarily forgiving, and continued to circle slowly for a good half-hour. I could just about see what everybody was up to from my deeper vantage point, but I still don’t know quite what finally caused the shark to depart. I was about 15m away and I saw it go vertical in the water, then it lashed out with its tail, as if stung, and sped off in the general direction of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know what someone had done to enrage such a placid animal, but a woman I had seen snorkelling close to it was lucky to swim away with her life. When the shark whipped its tail, it was a matter of feet away from her head, and I have no doubt that the impact could have killed her.

So it was with a jubilant atmosphere that the Evolution set off for the 100-mile overnight steam to Daedalus Reef. Marked by its glowering lighthouse, Daedalus Reef is known primarily as a hammerhead site, but we only saw them in the extreme distance. As our RIB returned to the Evolution, the boatman announced there was an oceanic white-tip under the boat. In fact, there were three, plus a silky shark. I spent pretty much the rest of the day diving under the Evolution, watching and waiting as the unpredictable, ocean-going sharks appeared from the misty blue, briefly investigating me before continuing their long patrols.

It was a wonderfully peaceful way to spend the day, slowly sucking down my air and surfacing for occasional drinks and cylinder refills. Different fish would come and go, seeking temporary shelter under the boat as various predators chased them away from the reef. By afternoon, brilliant shafts of sunlight contrasted against the looming shadow cast by the liveaboard, creating great curtains of light from which the sharks would majestically appear.

From there, it was another overnight push to remote Rocky Island. Its plunging reef walls are always worth a dive, but personally I don’t rate it for shark or fish action. Still, there is a local pod of spinner dolphins, and they gave us a few minutes of high-speed snorkelling fun, diving deep whenever we managed to get close to them. For a contrast to all the blue-water diving, Ali Baba indulged my request to visit the Russian freighter wreck on nearby Zabargad Island. Opinion varies as to whether it was really working as a spy ship when it sank in the Seventies, but it’s a splendid shallow dive, with plenty of scope for rooting around inside.

That afternoon, the Evolution headed further south, to Gotta Gibli, the southernmost point of the St John’s reef system. There was time to dive on the sheltered side twice, in the late afternoon and once as a night-dive proper – the reef gives way to a sand bottom at 24m, so it’s a relaxed place to dive and enjoy the local anemone colony at the southernmost limit of Egyptian diving.

So, yes, the Royal Evolution was able to complete its ambitious itinerary with ease, despite being hampered by high winds on the first two days. For just a week, it’s a truly impressive voyage, though some divers may feel a little rushed by the crew because of the pressure to keep on the move. Our only gripe was that St John’s has far more fishlife in the summer (we were visiting in November), and we would have preferred to have spent another day diving under the boat, playing with oceanic sharks at Daedalus. How ironic that Yasser should have gone to such effort to build a liveaboard that could take in the most famous dives in Egypt, only for the boat itself to become the best site of them all!

ALL MOD CONS

The Royal Evolution’s engines are set on shock absorbers so that noise is reduced to a mere hum in the cabins. The 39m-long vessel’s Australian design has been modified by owner Yasser El Moafi, previously the owner of the Royal Emperor. She is extremely spacious, with all the gadgets now common in upper-end liveaboards, including a hot tub/Jacuzzi on the sun deck. At the time of writing, the boat was preparing to launch charters into Sudanese waters from southern Egypt… watch this space.

Simon Rogerson and art editor David Lloyd (topside photography) were guests of M/S Royal Evolution (www.royalevolution.com ) and Planet Dive ( www.planetdive.co.uk 0870 7491959)