The Red Sea – Day 4: Daedalus and the Deep Blue
THE RED SEA
Day 4: Daedalus and the Deep Blue
June 25, 2024
Another night of sailing, and we had finally made it to one of the Red Sea’s most iconic dive sites.
Daedalus Reef, also known as Abu Kizan, is one of the most remote dive sites in the Red Sea, located around 90 kilometres offshore from Marsa Alam. It’s a large, oval-shaped offshore reef crowned by a lighthouse, marking it as a navigation point for passing ships. The reef drops steeply into deep blue water on all sides, creating vertical walls covered in hard and soft corals, massive gorgonian fans and dense fish life.
While I hadn’t even heard of this place before Amelia mentioned it, Daedalus is renowned for big pelagic encounters – hence its popularity. Apparently, it’s so good that we’d have a total of six dives there over the upcoming two days. With everyone else seemingly unable to contain their excitement, I was itching to get into the water.
With Amelia taking the lead in the Zodiac as the captain, we were finally off and ready to start our dive.
Big Stuff, Small Stuff
Lemme just say, the site truly did live up to expectations. I’m not gonna go into everything we saw and everything we were so lucky to experience down there. I am, however, gonna mention a few highlights.
Over the next three dives, we got to see some of the big stuff – like more hammerheads, with a school of them far away in the distance; a manta ray, which I will never get tired of seeing glide effortlessly against the current; a huge, human-sized Napoleon wrasse; and a green sea turtle, which I’m kinda over after my Indonesia dive trip.
And there was plenty of small stuff too to keep us entertained – like a colourful chromodorid nudibranch, which was probably my favourite thing, given my undying love for nudibranchs.
I guess it wasn’t these few creatures alone that made the dives incredible. It was all the sea life we had already seen before, only amplified here. The walls, the coral, the blue, the constant possibility of something massive appearing from the deep – everything felt bigger, wilder and more alive. Daedalus had somehow taken everything I loved about the Red Sea and brought everything together!