Scuba Diving In The Red Sea Egypt – General Travel Information
Most scuba divers from our geographic area in North America will probably travel to the Caribbean for their fly away dive trips. Very few think about venturing further away across the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans to the other side of the world for diving but after you’ve dived some of the key Caribbean destinations, I highly recommend going out further for your dive travels. One of the top scuba diving destinations in the world is the Red Sea off Egypt. I went to scuba dive there as part of a bigger trip to Egypt to see the ancient Egyptian antiquities like the Great Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings.
There are three main areas in Egypt for scuba diving with Sharm El Sheikh at the north end of the Red Sea as the most established one and Hurghada and Marsa Alam as smaller ones further south. Sharm El Sheikh has been established as a general beach destination for European visitors for many years but has many dive shops and resorts since scuba diving is a major industry there.
All three areas have airports so one can fly to any of them but depending on where you are flying from, you might have to connect through Cairo. But Cairo is just a short flight away if this is the case. There’s also scuba diving at other smaller ports in Egypt as well as from other countries that surround the Red Sea including Jordan and Israel but the three main areas of Sharm El Sheikh, Hurghada and Marsa Alam have the most scuba diving tourism. One of my dive friends Thomas (who use to dive with our local dive group here before he moved back to Germany), did a liveaboard in the Red Sea and said it was great.
Here’s a video showing some nice diving there.
Unique Scuba Diving In Red Sea
The water temperatures range from 86 degrees F or 30 degrees C during the summer but can dip down to 71 degrees F or 22 degrees C in the winter. Up to 20% of the marine life in the Red Sea would be native to the waters here and found nowhere else in the world. Lionfish are quite abundant here as I saw schools of them. They are native to the Red Sea as well unlike in the Caribbean where they are considered an invasive species.
One thing I found really interesting is the geography of sea and desert. This is very different from the usual tropical dive locations in the Caribbean where you have the ocean, beach and lush palm trees and jungles.
Another different thing about many dive sites in the Red Sea is that coral reefs can grow quite close to the surface. So rather than doing a standard safety stop at 15 feet at the end of some dives, we simply continued to explore marine life near these reefs which were quite shallow. The time at the end of these dives spent in these shallow reefs became our safety stops.
Another weird thing I noticed is that many dive shops do not have their own tanks. Instead, dive boats stop at a barge containing lots of scuba tanks and this barge seems to service all dive operators in the area. So our boat picked up tanks at this barge on the way out and dropped them off on the way back. Maybe by now, some dive operators have their own tanks since my trip to Egypt was during 9/11.
I did a night dive here too and saw some crabs or lobsters that look very different from what I normally see in the Caribbean. They were such odd shaped and I didn’t know if they were crabs or lobsters!
The Red Sea is definitely worth diving even if some of the coral has been bleached. But travel to the region does have risks that go in cycles depending on what the political and terrorism related activities have been in the middle east. So one would probably be smart to go there when things are a bit on the quiet side. I was fortunate enough to visit Egypt just before a corporate Mediterranean Sea cruise so most of my flights were already covered by the company I was working for so I added a vacation there as part of a big overseas trip.
It was a bucket list trip for me to see both the ancient Egyptian ruins including a three day cruise on the River Nile plus three days of scuba diving at Sharm el Sheikh but during my River Nile cruise, the September 11 attack in New York City happened. I stayed in Egypt to complete my trip there though but things were tense as security especially in Cairo and the airports as well as popular tourist sites were beefed up significantly with more machine guns ever imagined. But Egypt is a trip of a lifetime for anyone and the scuba diving added on as a diver makes this destination very worthwhile if you can catch it during a quiet time.
