Diving in the Red Sea is like diving in an aquarium. The water is incredibly clear and the coral I saw was abundantly healthy. The water tempature varies widely over the year, from 23 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius. So the Red Sea’s coral are used to wide temperature fluctuations and have so far shown minimal loss due to ocean warming and bleaching.
I spent a week on a dive boat going through the southern Red Sea. It was a very relaxing experience. This part of the Red Sea is known for sharks and coral. The group I was with didn’t see any sharks, but the other group did see a few hammerheads. However, we all definitely saw wonderful coral and sea life.
The Red Sea Diving
With the increasing bleaching of coral around the world I wanted to include a lot of coral videos below to document what healthy coral looks like. Hopefully, this diverse ecosystem can keep up its health.
We did a couple of night dives and, as you can see, it’s a whole different experience for diving in the Red Sea.
Diving the Salam Express Wreck
We also dove the Salam Express Wreck. It has a sad history. It was a ferry boat taking passengers between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1991 the captain misjudged his direction and hit a reef while going at full speed. The hull split and the boat sunk immediately. The official count had over 500 passenger, but they unofficially estimate there was over 1600 people aboard. There were only 160 survivors.
Most of the sunken boat was sealed off because they couldn’t get most of the bodies out. But you can still dive through the open car section at the back and can still see many of the personal affects of the passengers.
The Blue Adventurer
Our boat (Blue Adventurer) was really comfortable, the food was great, and the crew was fantastic.
An Aborted Dive
That one exception to my relaxing diving was the first time in over 200 dives where I decided to abort a dive. We dove off a dingy boat into a strong current. I realized I was underweighted and didn’t get down very quickly and got caught in the current. By the time I got down the rest of the divers were way ahead of me. I pushed to catch up, but I was sucking in a ton of air. I knew I could make it to them, but I’d have a very short dive once I caught up. And then I got caught in an upswell and found myself back almost at the surface.
So I decided to bail on the dive. I surfaced, fumbled around with my large orange surface buoy, got it finally inflated, and then just relaxed as the current took me around the opposite side of the relatively small Brother Island. I figured I could just drift around that side of the island and then get to the boat from there. But I saw one of our dingys in the distance, so I waved my buoy and he came by to pick me up.
It turned out everyone else had the same problem and ended up doing the same thing I did, but underneath me. We all ended up on the opposite side of the island than our original dive plan. But at least they got a normal, although somewhat short, dive in.
For the record, we dove at Gota Abu Ramada, Brothers Islands, Daedalus Reef, Elphinstone Reef, Abu Dabab, Ras Torombi, the Salam Express Wreck, Panorama Reef, and Small Giftun Island.