Either last night wasn’t as bumpy as the night before, or I’m getting my sea legs. Making it to bed was hard enough, though, as the whole ship swayed from side to side, bumping me into alternating walls like a human pinball. Luckily I didn’t end up going through one of the doors into someone else’s room.
The seas must have been somewhat rough, though, as proved by exhibit No. 1: water coming in my supposedly waterproof porthole. Exhibit No. 2: we’ve arrived late at our dive destination. We’ve been allowed to sleep in, and will be starting the day with breakfast, rather than a dive, to allow the crew time to get the dive platform ready. After breakfast we peruse the map. We’re almost as far south as we can get, hovering on the very edge of Egypt’s Red Sea, in what is known as The Borderlands. As one of our guides told us before we headed off, if we get swept to sea down here, we should bring our passports, as we may suddenly find ourselves in Sudanese waters.
We’ve come a long way to be here. Including the flight to Egypt, we’ve traveled a total of about 45 hours by plane, car and ship to get this far. And when we break the surface, it’s clear that it was all worth it. Diving the area of Abu Fandera we see some of the most pristine reefs I’ve ever had the pleasure of diving. There are giant brain corals, wall-to-wall fire corals, anemones the size of coffee tables, and more marine life that we can count. It seems as if anywhere there’s even the slightest outcropping of rock, even if it’s just a small stone sitting on the seafloor, corals simply pounce on it, covering it all around.
We also dive several cave systems, in particular in the Abu Fandera reef system, and at Fury Shoals, most of which have yet to be completely explored by any diver, so we approach them with caution. Our exploration pays off in spades, though, as not only do we find several long passageways, but these more often than not open up into large caverns, many of which open up to the top of the reef, making the caves quite safe to dive.
The reef system generates funnels where water is pushed through from time to time, making for great — and fast — drift dives. On one dive we’re quite literally swept away by a fast-flowing current as we exit a cave, zooming along the reef at almost cartoonish speeds. But because the reefs are typically fairly small, the current slows down quickly as soon as you reach a corner or when the area between reefs opens up to a larger space. This makes it a great place for new drift divers to gain some experience with fast drifts, as they aren’t overly long, and there’s little chance of being swept off the reef.
One of the main drawbacks of the area is that the warmer water makes hammerhead, and most shark, sightings unlikely in the summer months. In early spring or late fall your chances of shark spotting are quite good, in particular around St. John’s. Most of our dive sites were only reachable by liveaboard, due in part to the distance from shore and in part to the distance from marinas. One reef system that allows for day trips is Fury Shoals, an area we visited on the way back. A bit south of Marsa Alam, the reef system can be reached from hotels on shore by Zodiac.
We found the extreme south to hold adventurous diving, with pristine reefs and corals. But we also saw signs of human activity, with some damage on certain reefs. Whether these came from anchoring boats or from trawl nets was hard to say, but either way, the damage was done. And as more and more divers seek sites away from the well-known areas in the north, the area is likely to start seeing increased diving activity. Hotel development this far south is scarce; the financial crisis and fear of unrest in the region have halted most building projects, so that gives adventurers some time to discover the area, but this may not last. And with the Red Sea becoming increasingly overfished, like most bodies of water in the world, Egyptian fisherman are venturing further and further south, and Sudanese fishermen further and further north.
Sitting on deck one evening towards the end of our trip, something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. Something on shore, something I haven’t seen in days: electric lights. As we progress further north, civilization starts making its appearance along the coast, and we come to terms with coming back. Just before we really reach charted waters, though, we do a wall dive on the famous Elphinstone Reef. Although we dove it on the journey south, we saw none of the sharks that the reef is so famous for (it was the wrong season), so we give it another go. We swim down to the southern plateau and wait, swimming against the push of the current as we stare into the blue. After a while, we give up and turn around. And just then, on the plateau itself, a large whitetip reef shark and a giant Napoleon wrasse make an appearance, almost as if the sea wanted to reward us for our patience. After spending several minutes in the presence of these two majestic creatures, my dive timer tells me that it’s time to surface, and I swim lazily up towards the vessel. Time to go home.
For more on our liveaboard, the M/Y Red Sea Adventurer, check out blueotwo.com.
For a video clip from the trip, see:
A longer version is available here:
