RED SEA SCUBA DIVING HOLIDAY REPORT

OCTOBER HALF TERM BREAK - OCTOBER 19th-OCTOBER 26th
We took advantage of the staff development day before half term to make an early escape from a drizzly UK to sunny Egypt.   Pick-ups started at 5 in the morning, so that we could be sure of getting round the M25 to Gatwick before the traffic snarled up.   We were allowed an extra 10kg of hold luggage allowance for our SCUBA gear, and most of us were up to the limit.   Flight time was four and three quarter hours, taken up by watching X-Men 3 and a lot of snoring.   Those doing their Advanced Open Water on holiday read up on some of the chapters and did their knowledge reviews.   Then the 757 bumped down and we'd landed in Sharm el Sheikh.   The door opened to a welcome blast of warm air.   Quickly through the airport checks (though the baggage took a while) and on to our hotel.   Normally, we would stay at a hotel near the centre of Naama Bay, but this time we stayed out of town, half-board at the Gardenia Plaza, near Sharks Bay.   The rooms were comfortable and clean, and we were just in time for dinner, so a quick freshen up first.   After dinner, we haggled with a taxi driver to get a good price into town (haggling is part of the fun) had a stroll around town and found our divecentre.

A minibus picked us up the next morning, and we joined our dive boat "New Maestro" (sack the painter who had spelt it New Mastero on the side).   We eight made up about half the divers on board.   We started with some local coastal reef dives to allow us to experiment with weighting and configuration and for the dive guides to suss out how good we were.   Happily, they liked what we saw and let us dive independently, if we liked, from then on (must be something to do with the good quality of instruction, then ?).   We jumped ship and selected a different boat going out to the mid channel of the Straits of Tiran.   Here, there are some of the prettiest (and least damaged) coral reefs in the area.   One, Jackson's reef, is particularly pretty, and always worth a visit.   It lies mid channel where the currents split around it, bringing nourishment, and lots of fish of all colours and sizes.   Here, too, was our frst opportunity to go deep (down to 30 metres, though the reef wall drops down to about 50m, and then off to around 800m) and see a rare red anemone, which fluoresces bright red, even though colour absorption makes normal red things appear dull at that depth.   For those doing their Advanced, here was an opportunity to do some tests to see if they were feeling any effects of Nitrogen Narcosis (it kind of dulls your senses and slows you down), and a few games of noughts and crosses, while suspended over the abyss, revealed some scrambled thinking.
     
On some dives, we experienced mild to strong drifts.   In these, you adjust your buoyancy and just hang suspended at your chosen depth while nature brings the scenery past you.   Saves all that energetic finning around stuff.
On other dives, notably Yolanda and Shark reefs we had to fin against strong currents to move between two island reefs.   This requires you to fin hard, close to the bottom, without kicking it all up, so once again, good buoyancy is the order of the day.   And between Shark Reef and Anemone City is a void of deep blue water.   You can see nothing else, above you, below you, around you.   With good compass navigation and depth control, not to mention a little faith, you can swim out into the blue on a heading.   Eventually, out of the deep blue mist ahead, appears the outline of a reef wall, and the comfort of knowing that you really were going in the right direction, after all !   Anemone City is so called because there are separate clumps of anemones where clownfish live (remember Nemo ?).   Each clump is home to a distinct specie of clownfish (if only Darwin had done his Open Water !!!).

On our final day's diving, we took in the wreck of the Dunraven.   She was a freighter carrying timber and cotton which did a "Titanic" along the side of a reef, promptly sank and turned turtle.   Today, you can descend to her upturned keel, swim between the blades of her propeller, and penetrate through gashes in the stern and amidships, always in view of the outside blue.

On our last morning, our no-dive day, we were picked up at 4 in the morning, to go quad biking in the mountains.   Wrapped in Arab head dresses, we headed off over the humps and bumps into the darkness through the valleys and up into the foothills to a vantage point where we could  pause and look back eastward over the Red Sea.   At the moment of sunrise, there is an optical illusion, a mirage, that hides the Sun and shows you the atmosphere on the other side of the Earth instead, and then *ping* there is a bright spark and someone puts a coin in the meter and switches the Sun on.   In an instant it is up above the mirage; a shining globe turning the mountains gold.   A moment for photos and then mount up and bounce back down the trail to a group of dusty grins and breakfast.

Other highpoints of the week included a large turtle, totally chilled out grazing on the soft corals while a shoal of divers snapped photos, fearsome moray eels, and the general wonder and beauty of the "fish soup" through which we were able to swim.   The daytime air temperatures ranged from 30-35oC, and the water temperature from 26 to 30oC.   So warm, in fact, that we dispensed with wetsuits and just dived in trunks for some of the dives.   We made 16 dives, two on some days, three on others.

We experienced and appreciated the beauty and power of Nature, we also witnessed the cost of human presence, of damaged coral and clumsy divers (happily, none of us), and we came away with a little more passion and intent to protect the environment. 
I think everyone would agree that they ended the week better divers, both technically, and more aware, and impatient to come back and explore more.

Congratulations to James Dobberson, who gained his Advanced Open Water Diver certification on holiday, with Deep, Navigation, Boat, Drift and Wreck dives.