Dahab

Dahab, Sinai, November 2005

Dahab was smashing. It is still a place, which attracts mostly scuba divers, and the surrounding mountains of Sinai make the place a bit different than the African shore of the Red Sea (if you are not aware, Sinai represents Egypt's Asian part).

The best thing to do when the most beautiful, golden and dry, part of autumn is already gone, and rainy, muddy, chilly, bloody gray days are about to come, is to go down south. The diving itch was unbearable those days and I counted down to the autumn holidays.

I'm delighted to say the trip had no flaws. First of all, I expected colder and windier weather this time of year. But I was positively surprised as the temperature exceeded 26 degrees easily at noon. There was almost no wind, just in the morning sometimes. Anyway, five millimeters thick overall neoprene was okay and seven would be too much for me. So, practically no current during diving and there was an excellent visibility all the time.

The other thing was the city of Dahab itself. The divers' Mecca... It is a nice place; even though there are lots of hotels built nowadays, they are not any big, so they don't spoil the city line seen from the neat esplanade. The boys will pull you into every shop with their words "Hello my friend, best price for you!" and we recognized each other pretty soon, so my way from the hotel to the diving center became a pretty long journey, as I had to chat with every one of them a bit.

I am a fierce enemy of smoking, mainly of cigarettes to be exact. But I enjoyed Egyptian "szisha", hookah, the water pipe, pretty much. It was a very relaxing to have a long, easy smoke in the evening when chatting with friends or just watching the sea and the stars.

But the coolest thing was our team as there were only four of us. The guys were very experienced and from the beginning we dived by ourselves more or less. I dived with Alex (DM), an underwater cameraman and photographer. We quite often separated from Jan (IANTD Instructor) and Bohus (AOWD) as they used only their eyes to capture all that underwater beauty and had no cameras. Alex and I enjoyed long dives in shallow water, which brought us heaps of nice shots. Easy going, experienced, disciplined, funny people with low air consumption... what would you want more?

Boat diving near Dahab is quite uncommon. Jeeps are the favorite mean of transport to the diving sites (and pickups for the equipment), but you can always try a camel, there are lots of them.

This is our second diving day. We are on "Islands" location. Nice shallow water makes it easy to enter the water. Soon we are squeezing through a small fissure, entering the open sea. Steep walls and small, few meters in diameters, peaks or "islands" make the diving interesting. So we swim among the corals enjoying rich life and abundant colors of rather shallow waters. From time to time a lionfish, the poisonous beauty, can be seen:

Then we enter a sandy, flat part and we are hovering on twenty meters or so. Out of the blue there is a huge silvery sphere. It turns to be a school of young barracudas. Barracuda is an underwater lightning as it comes to speed. I have seen this slim, stripped predator many times before, but never is such numbers. Every time when I see them hanging motionlessly with their teeth partially exposed it makes me wonder how much truth there is in the stories of great barracuda temperament. "Better cover the D-rings of your jacket when barracudas are nearby... they could burst into the metal reflection thinking this is a fish... I don't believe barracudas, sharks have at least little intelligence, but barracuda head is just too small..." one Dive Master once said. Barracudas are very calm animals most of the time, however they can grow to two meters... so better treat them with respect. Anyway, those we have seen were about thirty, forty centimeters long. And there were several hundreds of them. They swam without any fear, as to say "we are predators". I was soon surrounded enjoying the sight of their glistering shiny bodies. They were quite curious, so we could observe them for several minutes and we were those who said goodbye.

Diving in Dahab is probably known best for one location called "Blue Hole". This is a very interesting place, like a huge well, about hundred meters in diameter, drilled into the rock. The hole is separated from the open sea, connected with it by small cave on about fifty meters. Many people drowned on this site, although it's a very calm place with easy diving conditions. Some people say it has special powers and it wakes up the desire to go deeper and deeper. I think the thing is that this desire is in the heads of many divers and those easy conditions, good visibility and warm water, make them too confident... until they black-out and fall on the bottom on nearly two hundreds meters. I looked forward to dive there very much, but to be honest the dive was not so special. There are lots of people and you can see tech-divers from time to time.

The next day we are playing in shallow water near "Canyon". A quite big octopus driven by curiosity approaches and we take a few nice shots:

We continue our bloodless hunting in the shallows:

It is our fourth day and we are diving on "Caves" followed by "Shark" location for the second dive this day. On the former one you can see quite interesting opened cave easy and safe to penetrate. Nearby a pair of clownfish have a quite comfortable nest. They are awesome and easy targets for underwater photography, because clowfish are very territorial and they always stick to their home:

There are many sandy places around and garden eels can be seen almost everywhere. They are extremely careful and you have little chance to make a close picture of them. Maybe one day... when I have a rebreather... who knows...

During diving on "Shark" we experience another interesting encounter. There is a great school of tiny fish called "glassfish" (because they are partially transparent). It counts thousands and they are ignoring us completely as they are swimming around us. In few second we see what is the reason of their distraction. Parallel to the shoreline a few young jackfish swim purposefully, ordered like soldiers. Every minute or so they bang into the huge sphere of glassfish, sometimes centrally with their mouth open, sometimes trying to separate small school of them. The prey obviously treated us as something that could offer at least poor shelter, so we were in the center of the action for a long time. Even Alex lost his nerves and jerked his camera, losing a good sequence, when jacks shot straight on him.

I look forward for the next trip ;-)