The Red Sea – Day 3: Sharks, Wrecks & Sunsets
THE RED SEA
Day 2: Back in the Water
June 23, 2024
The morning wake-up call had both Amelia and me rushing to the lounge for a quick breakfast before we’d finally start our dives. We could hardly wait.
For our first dive – which would also be a check dive – we’d be going to Ras Disha Reef. The site features gentle sloping reefs, coral gardens and small pinnacles teeming with marine life. At this point, even a damselfish would’ve made my day. And so, all prepped and ready to go, we jumped on a Zodiac and made our way to the dive site.
Lemme just say, back-rolling into warm water is always the best feeling in the world. Or second best feeling. The best might be the descent – with the Red Sea’s marine life leaving us elated right from the very start.
Shoals of red damselfish and anthias welcomed us into their water, with the rest of the dive featuring all kinds of fish I had last seen back in Indonesia – like rainbow parrotfish, lionfish, anemonefish, pufferfish, triggerfish, moray eels and even blue-spotted stingrays. Not to mention all the beautiful corals, clams and the seascape in general.
It might just have been a check dive, but it was way more than either of us had expected. Amelia and I, together again – underwater – for the first time since that one lake dive in Nicaragua over a year and a half previously. It was so, so good to be back, baby.
Middle Reef Magic
After the dive, we set sail to our next dive site: Middle Reef – a popular dive site roughly an hour by boat from Hurghada.
As the name suggests, it lies midway between the coast and the outer reefs, with a buoy sitting atop the pristine cerulean water. The reef consists of a large central coral formation surrounded by sandy slopes and scattered coral pinnacles. According to Aladin, the site would offer excellent visibility and a mix of hard and soft corals, creating a colourful underwater landscape.
Needless to say, our first dive had raised our expectations through the roof. Spoiler alert: it didn’t disappoint. We saw everything we had seen on the previous site and then some – from titan triggerfish to crocodile flatheads, all sorts of angelfish and surgeonfish. And the best part? The safety stop, with thousands of colourful tiny fish making it feel as if we were suspended in a dream.
After the dive, we had lunch and had some time to make use of the boat’s upper deck to sunbathe a bit – something that would become part of our routine during our stay. We also got to watch the surreal sunsets that would paint the sky red and purple as the magical Red Sea turned dusky and black.
A Perfect Night Dive
You know what’s better than sunsets? What comes after. Night dives. Donning our flashlights, we’d be going to Middle Reef once again – this dive promising a completely different side of the reef we had seen during the day. With night dives being my favourite, I was literally counting the seconds to sundown.
God, I had missed night dives. As much as I had dived back in Malta, I hadn’t got around to doing one at night – for whatever reason. Finally, I’d get to feel the peace and tranquillity of floating in the dark once again. Waking up the parrotfish and squirrelfish is always something I feel guilty about, but to be completely honest, that guilt wears off quite quickly when you’re admiring other things that are meant to be awake at night.
We saw all kinds of things – slithering morays, floating trumpetfish, squirming synaptid sea cucumbers and hovering cuttlefish. It was truly a perfect dive!