Yes, it is that time of year when whilst the evenings are far from cool, they are no longer roasting hot. The heat from the roads and walls no longer bowls you over as you walk outside the air-conditioning after dark. This is when the sea subtly startst to cool down. Nothing major, you just find yourself shivering if you are on a dive for an hour, then you find yourself tempted to add another layer of neoprene, and it is downhill from there on!

I have added that first layer of neoprene… gone are the shorts n rash vest, and while the fleecie rash vest (courtesy of Fourth Element) has stayed, I have added a shortie wetsuit. And… I will be honest, it won’t be long before I’m back in my full length five mil, fleecie lined wetsuit again. I’m trying to hang out until October!
The diving is still lovely as ever, yes a tiny bit less on the life front, but lots of baby fish, and there have been some cool currents to play with over the last few weeks. Actually I did have to smile to myself a little when I had some divers terribly blase about the fact that our currents are nothing compared to a usual UK rip tide, however we had a hum dinger of a current on Shark and Yolande, and they all came out a little humbled.

Anyway… I digress.

DiveBunnie Home

After having had a bit of a nonstarter start to my week, I ended up doing a full 6 days’ work! I had been meant to private guide last Monday, but as the guests cancelled last minute, I ended up not working. However, on the day, I got called in to teach an Advanced course, so ended up with a week full of teaching and guiding, which was all quite nice.

This weekend, I had DiveBunnie Tee shirt work to do. Including creating a winter range… yes we do get winters here believe it or not. Ok the temperatures are still pretty much like a UK summer (our sea is warmer tho), but when you get out of the water, the winter breeze just cuts right through you brrrr. So that is when a fleecie, hoodie or woolly hat really does the trick. So I thought some funky DiveBunnie ones would be quite cool to have around.

So next week I will be guiding, starting with new divers tomorrow.

This is always quite interesting, as you never know who you are going to get. We can have a whole mixture from Open Water divers with four logged dives, to instructors with four hundred logged dives, and it’s a fine line between helping someone who needs it, and insulting someone who is fine on their own. Monday is always a bit of hectic one with us needing to register everyone, organise crew lists, make sure divers are on the same boats as their friends etc. And that is before we even leave the centre! Once on the boat, we need to subtly assess the abilities of our divers, enabling us to focus on those who most need it. We try (although are not always able) to keep the boat together, so people get to know each other and us, and which usually makes things run a little smoother.

So, tomorrow we will do a couple of gentle local dives, to ease people into it, allow them to do buoyancy checks and get back into the flow of another week’s diving. Cool

DiveBunnie Home

Back to teaching this week, I was on an open water course which turned out great. By the end of the week, we had six Open Water Divers, four of whom went on to do their advanced course! Now this is where I emphasise that by Advanced, we don’t mean full on rufty tufty diver gods, it is a bit more like doing your pass plus driver course. You get a bit more experience (five dives worth) with an instructor keeping an eye on you. And… because our guys had turned out to be very good, and our group small, we were able to take them to Ras Mohammed on the last day of their advanced course to get in a bit of drift diving! Fantastic.

We did the tame version of Shark and Yolande dropping on Anenome City and hugging the reef around the back of Shark Reef, but to be honest, we needn’t have bothered. Our students were like stars, their buoyancy spot on, the viz was fantastic, we could see the looming shadow of Shark Reef while we were still on the last outcropping of Anenome, and there was barely any current, just enough to give us a helping hand, but not enough to cause any challenges. Perfect. A lovely end to a good week.

DiveBunnie Home

I know! It must seem ridiculous planning for the cold when it is still in the mid thirties outside, but for once in my life I thought I would be prepared and sort out my dry suit ahead of time. Well, come October our only drysuit repair man will be inundated with skanky dry suits that have been sat in their bags nicely rotting away all summer, and it will take weeks to get any work done. Knowing that my suit was in a state by the end of last year, I thought I would get in there early and get it all done and tested ready for November (actually last year I hung out until December before I had to give in n go dry).

However that did mean testing out the neck seal whilst it is still roasting hot outside, and he really really wants me to check another potential leak as soon as possible!!! Just the act of putting the seal over my head seemed like far too much like hard work, as dry suits are. But no doubt it won’t be long before I am once again used to the 8 extra kilos of lead I’ll need, not to mention the effort it takes just to get into the suit before the dive. Ah well, happy days of winter in Sharm.

Of course those of you that have been out here will know that a winter here is pretty much like a good UK summer with both water and air being about 21ºC, so we are completely wussy here. However when it is windy and you have three dives in Tiran to do, believe me, it makes a biiiiig difference when you come out of the water dry! Or perhaps I should say… that is the plan!!

DiveBunnie Home

DB Home

So this week I was guiding! So got to dive some of my favourite dive sites:

After the usual local shake down stuff, we went a little further afield, White Knight failed to impress (I do like the topography there, but hey… I do have to agree the coral life has been pretty decimated there over recent years), but Ras Bob to Nasrani was very pretty as usual. We ended up with a nice little drift going on, which was good for some of the divers who were relatively inexperienced, but wanted to stay with the group going to Tiran the next day.

Jackson reef was awesome as always, glorious corals, and hordes of fish. Thankfully I managed to avoid the hordes of other divers and thanks to very little current, were able to hang out over the garden for ages. In the afternoon we even managed to get around the back of the reef to go and look for the Hammerheads. Us guides saw nothing but plankton!!! But most of the guests did get a glimpse of a small collection of hammerheads. Unfortunately, if you drop deeper to look at them, they are very quick to scoot off. Which is what happened. At least they saw the sharks, making it worth all the plankton.

Ras Mohammed was awesome as always, with the snapper wall still intact, and some great drifty bits on the front of Shark reef, but very little on the wreck of the Yolande, so we got the chance to bimble there which was very cool. In the afternoon we drfted from anenome city back to Shark Observatory, which is a dive I love but very rarely get to do.

The week culminated in the jewel in the crown Thistlegorm. We took the boys off to the wreck yesterday, and I think they quite liked it.. hehehe. The currents were ideal, with virtually nothing on the first dive, and some on the second, but nothing like I have seen there. We saw some great life, and actually got to browse around a different part of the wreck to normal because our moorings were right on the stern of the wreck. I got to really look at the shallower part of the stern which is swarming with glassfish! I had no idea they were there, it was sooo pretty (OK I know… wrecks are not meant to be pretty…). I got the chance to really look properly at the gun on the back deck too, which is still pretty much intact which was cool.

I now have a couple of days off! So I can relaaax.

Well it was back to the small stuff this week, but I did get to see a very cool baby eagle ray yesterday… he stayed with us for a good ten minutes too, burrowing into the sand in search of food. We all just sat and watched, no need to swim any further really, we had now seen what I had hoped to see.
Today I was at Paradise reef which had a humping current. So we swam against it for fifteen minutes not getting very far, when my student signalled half a tank, so we had to turn round. Of course we were back at the jetty in about 2 minutes! It was great, loads of fish flying around, no big stuff though. Nothing bigger than a jack fish. Ah well.

DiveBunnie Home