Red Sea dive trip
Feb. 2nd, 2010 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI am home, and the ground has finally stopped moving. We did three days' shore-based diving, from Shark's Bay, just round the eastern side of the tip of Sinai so handy for the Straits of Tiran, followed by three days on a live-aboard, which allowed us to head round to Ras Mohammed and the Straits of Jubal. I've not stayed on a boat for that long before; it was a sort of budget trip, none of the en-suite bathrooms and back-rub after every dive that you see advertised in the luxury ones, but the boat was clean and functional and the crew were friendly and the dive guide was great, knowledgeable and enthusiastic and unflappable, and all 11 of us were from the same club, making a recipe for an enjoyable trip. The day basically went: get up hideously early, have a cup of peppermint / green tea and a couple of biscuits, get into dive gear, dive, get out of dive gear, eat a proper breakfast (cooked by a Sudanese chef called Selim) from a heap of buffet, sit around in the sun for a while, get into dive gear, dive, get out of dive gear, eat lunch from another heap of buffet, sit around in the sun for a bit, get into dive gear, dive, get out of dive gear, eat cake, sit around while the sun goes down, get into dive gear, night dive, get out of dive gear, eat dinner from a heap of buffet, sit around for an hour or two chatting, sleep. Strangely, this is much more tiring than it sounds, and we were all pretty much destroyed (and feeling like the ground was constantly moving) by the time we got back.
We got very lucky on the Thistlegorm. This is the Red Sea's most famous wreck, bombed and sunk in World War II by German aircraft no-one thought could reach that far down the Red Sea, and it's mostly in remarkably good nick, sitting upright on the bottom, with holds full of trucks and motorbikes. Apparently it's the second most popular thing to visit Egypt for behind the Pyramids, and can be very crowded, but we managed to arrive at 7am on the only day with no wind, with no other boats there at all, mooring to the wreck's own bollards on a sea so still and clear you could see the top of the wreck, 15 metres down, from the deck of the boat. The oddest thing about that was that wreck dives feel like British dives, to me, but the fish were un-British tropical ones. I'd tried to make the effort to identify and write down a handful of fish after every dive, so as to be able to identify more subsequently rather than going 'oh, it's them orange ones again', so by the time we got to this dive I could name the Red Sea anthias and the gold-band fusiliers, the bi-colour chromis and the parrotfish and triggerfish, and the blotcheye soldierfish in the hold and the lionfish under the water tank, and go 'eh?' about them being on a wreck. I mean, parrotfish eat coral for the algae that live in and on it (and crush it up in the process, thus being the single largest producer of sand; next time you look at a sandy white beach, just remember that's basically parrotfish poo) and there wasn't a lot of hard coral growing on the wreck yet; do they munch on the metal? Are they making iron sand? Still, excellent dives.
I enjoyed the night dives we did, but it is weird, and undeniably panic-threatening at first, to go diving in the dark. In water where you can normally sit at 25 metres down and still see the boat on the surface, it's odd to be at five metres, right under the boat, and only be able to see the bit of sand you're pointing your torch at, and a vague outline loom of the boat against the moonlight. There was absolutely nothing threatening in the sandy lagoons we did the night dives in - not even that much of interest, really, with only the small coral pinnacles the boat was moored to as focal points, but it still takes a couple of goes to break the dark = scary thing. There was no chance of getting actually lost, no current and as soon as you surface the boat is a blindingly obvious brightly lit thing, but underwater it was navigation by compass or rope-following, which then feels like you must be able to get lost. Sleeping fish are kind of spooky, too. On one dive there were loads of them lying in stacks together on the coral, half on their sides, looking basically dead until you shine a torch on them and they do the equivalent of squinting accusingly at you from under the blankets. The lionfish were fun, though; they will follow your torch beam around and use the light for hunting. If you shine your torch at some unsuspecting small fish, you get to see them pounce. And the starry pufferfish, huge things that look like the body of a cargo helicopter sculling gently around, never seemed to be asleep, or wary of people at all.
Definitely my kind of holiday. Some periods of sitting around in the sun, or in the dark drinking beer, interspersed with looking at cool stuff. On the last day we couldn't dive (you need to get rid of any excess nitrogen in your system before going on a lower-than-atmospheric-pressure plane) and there was bugger all to do in Shark's Bay itself other than sit in the sun and do nothing. We tried to go for a walk, ran into a dead end, an all-inclusive resort that wouldn't let us walk along their beach and a pavement-less, featureless road inland, and were back on the beach with nothing to do within twenty minutes. Even packing up dive gear is more interesting than watching rotund tourists attempt to singe themselves.
We got very lucky on the Thistlegorm. This is the Red Sea's most famous wreck, bombed and sunk in World War II by German aircraft no-one thought could reach that far down the Red Sea, and it's mostly in remarkably good nick, sitting upright on the bottom, with holds full of trucks and motorbikes. Apparently it's the second most popular thing to visit Egypt for behind the Pyramids, and can be very crowded, but we managed to arrive at 7am on the only day with no wind, with no other boats there at all, mooring to the wreck's own bollards on a sea so still and clear you could see the top of the wreck, 15 metres down, from the deck of the boat. The oddest thing about that was that wreck dives feel like British dives, to me, but the fish were un-British tropical ones. I'd tried to make the effort to identify and write down a handful of fish after every dive, so as to be able to identify more subsequently rather than going 'oh, it's them orange ones again', so by the time we got to this dive I could name the Red Sea anthias and the gold-band fusiliers, the bi-colour chromis and the parrotfish and triggerfish, and the blotcheye soldierfish in the hold and the lionfish under the water tank, and go 'eh?' about them being on a wreck. I mean, parrotfish eat coral for the algae that live in and on it (and crush it up in the process, thus being the single largest producer of sand; next time you look at a sandy white beach, just remember that's basically parrotfish poo) and there wasn't a lot of hard coral growing on the wreck yet; do they munch on the metal? Are they making iron sand? Still, excellent dives.
I enjoyed the night dives we did, but it is weird, and undeniably panic-threatening at first, to go diving in the dark. In water where you can normally sit at 25 metres down and still see the boat on the surface, it's odd to be at five metres, right under the boat, and only be able to see the bit of sand you're pointing your torch at, and a vague outline loom of the boat against the moonlight. There was absolutely nothing threatening in the sandy lagoons we did the night dives in - not even that much of interest, really, with only the small coral pinnacles the boat was moored to as focal points, but it still takes a couple of goes to break the dark = scary thing. There was no chance of getting actually lost, no current and as soon as you surface the boat is a blindingly obvious brightly lit thing, but underwater it was navigation by compass or rope-following, which then feels like you must be able to get lost. Sleeping fish are kind of spooky, too. On one dive there were loads of them lying in stacks together on the coral, half on their sides, looking basically dead until you shine a torch on them and they do the equivalent of squinting accusingly at you from under the blankets. The lionfish were fun, though; they will follow your torch beam around and use the light for hunting. If you shine your torch at some unsuspecting small fish, you get to see them pounce. And the starry pufferfish, huge things that look like the body of a cargo helicopter sculling gently around, never seemed to be asleep, or wary of people at all.
Definitely my kind of holiday. Some periods of sitting around in the sun, or in the dark drinking beer, interspersed with looking at cool stuff. On the last day we couldn't dive (you need to get rid of any excess nitrogen in your system before going on a lower-than-atmospheric-pressure plane) and there was bugger all to do in Shark's Bay itself other than sit in the sun and do nothing. We tried to go for a walk, ran into a dead end, an all-inclusive resort that wouldn't let us walk along their beach and a pavement-less, featureless road inland, and were back on the beach with nothing to do within twenty minutes. Even packing up dive gear is more interesting than watching rotund tourists attempt to singe themselves.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 12:04 pm (UTC)I love being able to identify fish. We had one of the seasearch guys come talk to our club on Monday and we're thinking of organising that course for later in the year so we know what we're staring at underwater.
Do you know there are dozens of species of parrotfish and they're nearly impossible to identify individuals. In the wreck I suspect they're eating the young coral that are starting to turn the thistlegorm into a reef.
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Date: 2010-02-03 07:17 pm (UTC)Clidive had someone in to do the lecture-and-video part of the Seasearch course in January, and it was very good - not least for all the stuff that isn't fish. It's nice to be able to look at a blob of vaguely-coloured stuff stuck to a rock and use the arrangement of holes to tell you whether it's a tunicate or a sponge. We didn't get to go and do the practical bit, though, and have our trial assessments properly checked, so I've never quite felt confident enough to submit a form, though some others from the club have, including some of those dives we did in the Scillies.