PHOTOGRAPHS
of James & Carol's trip
diving in the Red Sea
at Sharm el Sheikh on the tip of Sinai
April 2006

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Although it is in Egypt Sharm el Sheikh is in Asia not Africa.

It is at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula between Africa (the rest of Egypt) and
Saudi Arabia (in Asia), where the Red Sea splits to the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba.
The very tip of the Peninsula, and the seas around it form the Ras Mohammed National Park.
(This is sometimes spelt "Rad Mohamed" - since the name is Arabic either Western spelling is correct.)

Arrival in Sharm el Sheikh

There is now a regular flight from Bristol, 20 minutes from my house, to Sharm with a charter airline Excel Airways.
The A320B legroom is diabolical for a five hour flight but it's cheap, and they are understanding about the weight of dive gear.
Sharm Airport has improved since we were last there in 2002, and it was good then.

Our only complaint is that while immigration do explain that an Egyptian visa, which may be bought on the spot,
is not necessary to visit Sharm el Sheikh but is necessary to visit Cairo and the Pyramids
they do not mention that it is also necessary to have one in order to dive in the Ras Mohammed National Park.
We were turned off the (pre-booked) boat after getting up at 06:00 a.m. because of this and never got to Yolanda Reef.

View of the desert at sunset

from the terminal building.

We were met at the Airport exit by a driver from the Camel Dive Club so our transfer, despite the weight of our dive gear, was totally painless.
The Airport is only a few miles north of the town (incoming aircraft pass over at less than 1000 m) so we were checked in less than 90 minutes after landing.

The Camel and Naama Bay

The Camel Dive Club is less than 50 metres from the sea in Naama Bay, the tourist centre of Sharm el Sheikh, which is a couple of miles north of the Old Town.
When Israel handed Sinai back to Egypt in 1983 Naama Bay was uninhabited - but the wonderful diving here was already well-known.
The original Camel Dive Club was built in 1986 on the sand roughly where the present hotel is and has grown with the resort.

It is not a five star hotel but it is extremely comfortable and ideal for diving and snorkeling. The roof bar is quite cheap, friendly, and convivial.
The swimming pool, unlike most resort hotels where it would be a few inches deep for the kiddiwinks, is several metres deep for diving lessons.
The beach is about 50 metres from the hotel and less than 20 metres offshore is a small reef. The coral is lousy (kicked to shreds by a LOT of people)
but the fish are magnificent. In a short evening snorkel we saw lionfish, parrotfish (of course), an eagle ray, several stingrays, garden eels,
a moray, clownfish in an anemone, innumerable different sorts of angelfish, butterflyfish, surgeonfish, triggerfish, goatfish and wrasse, and
a napoleonfish who must have weighed in at well over 100 kg swimming in water less than two metres deep.

The Camel's chamberlads (they don't have chambermaids) are accustomed to fold the new towels into fantastic shapes before laying them out on the beds.

The Camel Diving Centre is extremely efficient and professional, but still relaxed and friendly. There is a diving centre and a Padi Diving School
at the hotel, shown in the pictures above, with a lobby where beer, snacks and soft drinks are served and people can sit around and discuss the day's dives.
Camel also has diving centres at several resorts. The one at Paradise Bay, where Carol and I did a night dive, is shown below.
The floating jetty runs out to a reef wall which drops abruptly from near the surface to a depth of over 20 metres.

Camel operate their own dive boats, which load at the Naama Bay Dive Boat Jetty. Camel has a lot of divers each day (they don't all stay at the Camel Hotel)
and there are six to ten boats. Each has its own boat crew, who mostly live in the boat, and their galleys prepare hot lunches for the 10-25 divers on board.
The cooking is excellent - which is remarkable given the small, and quite simple, galleys - and costs only 45 Egyptian pounds (Approx Ł4/€6/$8) per person.
The first and last pictures show Naama Bay and the desert beyond as well as the dive boats.

The next photos show the jetty and gear loading. Camel Dive are very organised - their staff bring people's dive gear (and air) to the boats. The gear
is in numbered boxes so that the right gear gets to the right boats. Note the parrot fish near the surface behind the man with the air bottles in the centre.

While we were in Egypt Al Qaida bombs in Dahab about 60 km north of Sharm killed 23 people and injured 85. As a result security in Sharm was very high.
As you can see from the photos everyone coming to the dive boat jetty was searched - Carol has just come through the detectors.

For security's sake all motor vehicles were banned from the centre of Naama Bay, which made the place even more pleasant to walk in.
Temperatures while we were there in late April were in the high twenties and low thirties (C) but when we were there in July 2002 they reached 43 C.

It is possible to eat most of the World's cuisines in Naama Bay. Egyptian and Lebanese food may be had everywhere.
There is a Scottish restaurant

in the main street.
And Thai, Spanish, French, Chinese, Swedish, Swiss, and, in the Camel itself (and elsewhere) Italian and Indian restaurants as well.
A few yards from the Camel is a Lebanese seafood restaurant to die for. We ate there three times - quite cheaply and VERY well.
By the third visit we were being given complementary starters to keep us coming.

Where we Dived

The Sinai coast around Sharm el Sheikh is almost continuous coral reefs so it is possible to dive over beautiful coral within a few miles of home.
In fact if we had wished we could have dived from the shore for the whole week and seen plenty of wonderful fish and coral.
But boat diving is less work and you get to more places, so our only shore-based dive was our night dive.
We intended to dive in Ras Mohammed but, as noted above, we did not have the necessary visa.
So we mostly dived at "local" sites but we did visit two reefs in the Strait of Tiran.

At various times (not just this trip) we have dived at Ras Katy, Temple, Ras um Sid, Paradise Bay, Tower, Near Garden, Middle Garden,
Fiddle Garden (not on the map - near Middle Garden), Far Garden, Ras Nasrani, Thomas Reef, Woodhouse Reef and Jackson Reef.
I'm afraid we did not take many above-water photographs of dive sites, there are a couple of Paradise Bay above but the only other ones we took were at Tiran.

Tiran Island belongs to Saudi Arabia but is administered by Egypt. The heavy marine traffic of the Gulf of Aqaba passes between Tiran Island and Sinai,
and there are four major reefs within a few feet of the surface in a line across the strait: Gordon Reef, Thomas Reef, Woodhouse Reef and Jackson Reef.
Despite wide deep channels between them, charts and lighthouses, ships regularly hit these reefs - some of their wrecks are still visible above water.
The wreck is on Jackson Reef, the lighthouse on Thomas Reef, where we did a drift dive, and the island is Tiran Island.

We didn't see any big ships in the Strait of Tiran, but a rather nice ketch passed us under power,
and came back a few hours later under sail. She did not hit a reef while we were watching.

Diving and the Padi Advanced Open Water Course

You can get at the water in many different ways when diving - from the shore, from inflatables, from rafts, from canoes and even less likely ways

but dive boats are the most comfortable and convenient way - they have a platform from which you can step into the water
and convenient ladders in the water to let you climb out, even in quite rough seas, with minimum hassle and effort.

We had planned our holiday to dive in the warm Red Sea, bring our diving skills back up to date after nearly three years, and to look at all the pretty fish.
But the Camel is a Padi Diving School and so we also decided to improve our skills and take an "Advanced Open Water" Course
if the instructor who took us on our refresher "check dive" thought we were capable. We must have been a sore trial to Pierre
(the Camel dive team are every nationality under the sun - and can teach you to dive in most major languages) because although
we had not forgotten the theory our reactions showed the three years gap. (Carol reminded me that Artur Rubenstein the pianist once said
"When I don't practice for three days the audience notice, when I don't practice for two days the critics notice, but if I don't practice for one day I notice.")
Later in the week Pierre

remarked to me that he was surprised and gratified at how much better our skills were than on our first day.
But he passed us for the "Advanced Open Water" course despite our slightly shaky depth control and general lack of coordination, and my rather high air consumption.
This course involves training on deep diving and navigation (these two are mandatory) and three other specialities. We chose naturalist, drift diving and night diving.

At this point bureaucracy struck. Our certificates and logs were perfectly adequate for us to go diving - but we could not take a course without a medical check.
Luckily Sharm el Sheikh has a world renowned hyperbaric medical centre where doctors come from far afield to study dive medicine.
They gave us a thorough check-up and a clean bill of health to dive - and to take the course. But it cost us a day's diving, alas.

Once the formalities were over we met Mike Smith

our instructor and planned the course with him.
We would do the deep dive and the navigation dive the following day, our third (of seven) in Sharm.

So Murphy struck - Carol woke up with a migraine. I offered to stay with her but she drove me out to take the course.
Mike promised to see that Carol took the deep and navigation modules when she had recovered and introduced me to Cathy, a Norwegian

who had come to Sharm with a friend, just taken her basic Open Water Course, wanted to take Advanced and needed a buddy that day.

If you have any sense at all you do NOT take an unfamiliar camera (I had used the camera often enough - but not in its scuba case)
with you when you are doing demanding tasks not involving photography, so I do not have any photos of my course.
But there were other divers being trained when I was diving with the camera later in the week, and I accompanied Carol
when she did her deep and navigation dives on our last diving day and I took the photographs below then.

The first three show Carol, in the middle one she is equalising sinus pressure while descending.
The next three show her during her navigation dive and with Mike at the emergency air bottle which
hangs 5m below the dive boat in case extra air is needed during the safety stop after the deep dive.
The last three show Carol and Cathy, Mike, and some other divers /a/t/ /p/r/a/y/e/r/ doing bottom
exercises (probably as part of the basic Open Water Course, but possibly a check dive) respectively.

I did not get any photos of Carol's deep dive because I had an accident.

I do not use a weight belt but instead have a BCD (flotation device) with detachable weight pockets.
The instruction manual is not as clear as it should be and the extra velcro that secures them is
invisible when not in use. I have dived for some years with them incorrectly secured, without trouble
except once when entering the water from an inflatable, when I had assumed the problem was due to my
inexperience with inflatables. But as I was following Mike and Carol on her deep dive I turned upside
down to take a photograph, lost 12kg of weights, and shot uncontrollably to the surface from 23m.
Training pays - I used the correct techniques to slow myself (not enough - my dive computer was protesting
loudly all the way up) and exhaled continuously to prevent depressurisation problems. I had only been down
six minutes when it happened so there were no ill effects and another diver who was on his way down told
Carol and Mike that I was OK. But I couldn't dive again until Mike had found and recovered my weight pockets,
and was not present for most of Carol's deep (30m = 100') dive - so there is no photographic record.

Carol's deep dive was on the morning of our last diving day. In the afternoon she did her navigation dive
and I accompanied her with the camera. When she had finished her course work Mike asked if we were OK
(divers' hand signals allow quite detailed communictaion) and then left us - a vote of confidence in our skills!
We were in quite shallow water, beside a very beautiful reef, and we spent a long time there before our dwindling
air supply necessitated ending the dive. Our bottom time was nearly an hour - the longest dive I have ever made.

To avoid the bends it is necessary to wait for at least 24 hours after your last dive before flying,
so we spent the day we left (on an evening flight) on the surface of the water, snorkeling from a dive boat.

Sharm el Sheikh is a wonderful place to dive and the Camel's a great place to stay.
We'll be back soon and intend to take a nitrox course and get to Ras Mohammed again!

Our Fish and Coral Photos

Below are hyperlinks to (almost) all the photos we took. Several pictures appear more than once in this section,
with different thumbnails to point to different fish in the picture. We are not very experienced in underwater
photography or in the digital processing of our pictures or in fish identification and would therefore welcome
comments or advice on any or all of these topics. In particular corrections of misidentifications and identifications
of the "anonymous" fish and other things I saw and photographed would be very welcome.

For example - wottinell are these?

Antheas (other stuff too - but Antheas are the main interest in these pictures)

Antheas, Damselfish & Bicolour Pullers (or Bicolour Chromis or Half & Half Fish)

Antheas, Klunzinger's Wrasse & Surgeonfish

Bannerfish

Bicolour Pullers or Bicolour Chromis or Half & Half Fish

Bird Wrasse

Butterflyfish (Various)

Black-Backed Butterflyfish

Masked Butterflyfish (and some friends)

Polyp Butterflyfish (and some friends)

Striped Butterflyfish (and some friends)

Threadfin Butterflyfish

A Butterflyfish - But what sort?

Bluegreen Pullers

Clams

(They don't seem particularly happy to me - but how do you tell?)

Cleaner Wrasse

(They're rather small - can you see them?)

Damselfish (Various)

Whitebelly Damselfish

Sulphur Damselfish

Emperor Angelfish

Fusiliers

Goatfish (Various)

Forsskal's Goatfish

Yellow-Fin Goatfish & Yellow-Saddle Goatfish

Humbug Fish

Klunzinger's Wrasse

Masked Puffer Fish

Morays

Morays appear to be like ostriches (or the ravenous bugblatter beast of Trall)
and seem to think that if they can't see you then you can't see them.
The centre and right-hand pictures are of a Yellow-edged Moray - dunno about the other one.

Napoleonfish

These are big buggers (can go to 500kg) but quite harmless - and often friendly
if they think they might be fed. Carol had one approach to about 50cm while
snorkeling on our last day here. The last picture is a close-up of ones skin.

Orangespine Unicornfish

Parrotfish

Peacock Grouper

Picassofish

Not a very good picture but it was the only Picassofish I met when I had the camera.

Royal Angelfish

Another not very good picture but, again, it was the only Royal Angelfish I met when I had the camera.

Sandperch

Sailfin Tang

Sergeant Major Fish

Steinitz Partner Goby

The partner shrimp is not visible in this photograph.

Surgeonfish

Sweetlips

Titan Triggerfish and Triggerfish in the Blue

Various Coral

Various Unidentified Fish

In some cases we THINK we know - but are not certain enough to risk looking like idiots if we're wrong.
If there's something obvious like antheas there its the less obvious guy we're unsure of.