Well today, or rather yesterday, I got to hang my head in shame! I have lived on a cliff above one of our local dive sites for over a year now, and yesterday was the first time I had actually bothered to go snorkelling in what is pretty much my backyard!!!
We have a couple of friends over for a holiday so invited them round together with their snorkelling gear for a spot of fish spotting followed by a glass or two of wine. All very lovely.
I must say the snorkelling was great! To think that two minutes from my door, I can hop into crystal clear waters, and see all the usual suspects that we have here in Sharm. We saw several anenomes together with their resident clown fish, a free swimming moray, a peppered moray, loads of the usual butterfly and parrot fish and an octopus. In fact we saw two octopi (?) one of which was being eaten by a whole crowd of fish. All in all a great afternoon. The water temp. wasn’t too bad either with pockets of almost hot water, followed by sections of quite chilly, just to even it out.

So this week has been a busy one! Without a break, I have gone through a full open water course, followed by advanced open water, followed by a couple of days’ diving, a scuba review and then another advanced course!! All fun and games. Actuall, it was, we had nice, keen students and everyone did really well. We managed to get a few fantastic dives in the Ras Mohammed National park as well, so everyone went home fully inspired.
Talking of inspiration, Sharm is very much inspirational at present. We seem to be basking in a plethora of pelagics! Janna, one of our guides spotted a whale shark a couple of days ago in the Gardens area (a local dive site, no less). We have had turtles there too. I have seen several sharks over the last few weeks, admittedly in the Tiran or Ras Mohammed areas. Culminating in a great sighting last week on Ras Za’atar of a grey reef shark ambling along during the last dive of our day. Very cool.