The Bunnie Blog
Living and Diving in Sharm el Sheikh
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So our group had hired the boat and us for the next three days so we had some fun dives after their course. Gave the a great chance to get in some diving without the stress of having to do all the skills. Our first day was of course local, as we weren’t about to take our novice divers off to an area of strong currents and steep drop offs. In fact, even when we went further afield, we still kept to the relatively easy sites, not wanting to scare anyone off right at the start of their diving hobby. So day one was Local North or Montazzah as the area has become known. Because our guys were wanting a bit of a chill out and had the boat to themselves, we were able to adjust the schedule to suit them, so today we decided to do the two dives before lunch, then head back to the jetty, giving them an early finish. Our first dive was White Knight. This dive I love for its topography. It is famous for its canyon that sits right by the main reef and plunges down to a sandy ledge at 30 metres. Obviously this section was a little deep for our group, however we were still able to enter the shallow end of the canyon and follow the reef around to the right, as the canyon fell away below us. Hugging the reef, we continued along as it opened into a sloping sandy plateau dotted with corals. We saw a cute banded crab, however sadly missed a turtle! Doh! Hamada’s group saw it, and as I turned around he was shaking his rattle to get my attention… dratted hoods, they make you deaf! Anyway, we still had a lovely dive and got to do my favourite bit which is where you swim back across the canyon at 8 metres towards a huge salad coral. Looking down, it feels like you are hang gliding over a large valley below… very cool. Sadly we didn’t get the chance to see the eel garden as we had two on sixty bar, and had to head up for safety stops. The second dive was on Ras Ghamilla. This one is a little more challenging as we were to be doing our first drift dive, however there is a large sandy plateau below us at all times, ensuring that it was nice and easy to maintain depth. I only had two people for my dive, so in we dropped and the current was running just enough for us to enjoy a nice gentle glide along the reef. Ahhh very nice and chilled out. This reef is so pretty too, we saw huge shoals of milk fish at the surface, there must have been about fifty of them, big silver tuna like fish meandering through the shallows. The sandy plateau on this dive is dotted with table corals and very pretty pinnacles, which are great just to float by on our way. Hmmm I love diving this way, as we can chill out over lunch, and eat as much as we like without worrying about having to do another dive. Sometimes it can feel a little uncomfortable if you eat too much for lunch between dives… I guess just like any exercise after eating, it is always a good idea to give yourself a bit of a break to digest.
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Day two on the Referral Boat… So first task this morning was a little compass practice. Not bad at all, despite the early start, every one seemed on the ball, so off we went to the jetty for another day on the boat. This time we thought we would head around the corner to Temple, a site I haven’t dived for a few weeks. The first dive, we had a busy one, we practised our emergency swimming ascents (controlled of course), as well as compass swims, both on the surface and underwater. More masky stuff (not a popular one there) and fin pivots (this time using the oral inflator). We then headed off to see a few more fish and a bit of reef again. Sadly air was breathed a little speedily so we just about made it to 16m before I had to make a u-turn and head back for the mooring line. After lunch, the second dive went really well… the final dive of the course. We had a couple of skills in the shallows to perform, before heading off to the coral pinnacles that form the “temple” itself. Very pretty pinnacles reach up almost to the surface, around which we get large gatherings of baby fish, sometimes a few bigger fish, and lots of colour too. We spotted a blue spotted ray… in fact, my students spotted it! I had swum past it.. hang my head in shame! Well we circled the pinnacles, hit 100 bar, turned around and headed back to the shallows where we ended our dive. Yay! My four passed, as did the other two groups. A full house. So tomorrow we are off for some fun diving with our shiny new divers. 
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Twelve students, three instructors… this week we had a group of families finishing off their open Water course. These families tend to do things together, so this time they thought they would learn to dive. So briefings done and assessments completed, off we went for a dive. This was our students’ first time in the sea which can always be a little nerve wracking, however once down and under a little depth, we were off and finning. We had a relatively short dive around the reef, getting the finning style right, getting everyone to discover the wonders of using both their lungs and their bcd’s for buoyancy control.. oh and we saw a few fish! Dive two, we saw a blue spotted ray, but before that we had a few skills to get through. Not bad, the masky stuff is never popular, but it all worked out, and off we went for a swim. Hmmm I think the skills might have put people off a little. We had a bit of a bumpy dive hehe… a few ups and downs, but hey, it is only dive number two, and we have two more tomorrow for things to settle in.
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So this week we have just had a full moon which like a new moon can result in some rather strong currents, as the tides rise higher and lower than normal. Confusingly this is referred to as a Spring tide, however this is not related to the season. Here we usually seem to get the strong currents a couple of days after the full or new moon… I’m not entirely sure why. So being on a bit of a teaching tip this week, we had some fun and games with our novice divers. This month the tides seemed particularly strong (maybe that is a seasonal thing, but I am not sure.. I know in the UK they had a particularly high tide this month too with the bore on the River Severn providing quite a spectacle as the highest tide rolled in on Tuesday morning). I have dived the Gardens every day this week, and every day the currents have been quite lively in the morning and then almost flying in the afternoon! Great fun.. although not so easy on the navigation dive we did on Wednesday. Hmm the square pattern came out a bit wonky… We ended our dive on the mooring line, holding on with one hand each for our safety stop, while the current flapped us out like flags in the breeze. It was great fun. Sadly by the time we came to our drift dive yesterday, we didn’t quite get the timing right, and the current only really picked up in the last ten minutes of the dive while we drifted along to near garden. Of course stronger currents bring out all the fish, so we are not complaining, even if it can make the dives a little challenging. It will only be a month or so before we start getting really excited about all the big things coming in. Although having said that, the water is still much warmer than it should be for this time of year, so maybe all that will happen a bit earlier this time around. Who knows?
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I woke up yesterday feeling dreadful, hmmm the dreaded Pharao’s revenge… or so I thought. In fact, in reality I thought I had got myself well n truly dehydrated, which can make you just as sick as any food poisoning. Anyway, after a morning in the bathroom I have now been left with a stinking cold of all things?? So unable to equalise, I am high n dry for a couple of days  let’s hope it clears soon, so I can get back in the water… and back to work.
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Well it has been over a week now since the storm, life has been back to normal since the day after it all happened, and we are still talking about it! Well we don’t get a huge amount of weather here, and pretty much everyone was affected in one way or another, so I guess it is a novel topic. Back in the water, the visibility is back to normal (phew!) as is the weather. Instead of the glorious heatwave we were having before the storm, the temperature has plunged down to its normal winter level… OK let’s face it, even that is still pretty warm, we are talking about 22ºC instead of 28ºC, before you start to think we too are experiencing the arctic here. Amazingly the water is still a lovely 24ºC (a good couple of degrees warmer than normal), even in Tiran which is normally a degree or so cooler than everywhere else. Well we were in Ras Mohammed yesterday and had a glorious day. It started pretty well too… as we dropped down, I saw something floating down out in the blue (a shoe or something?) no… it was a spanish dancer!!! Wow! We don’t normally see them in the daytime, and even at night they are pretty rare! This one was out in the blue and as I approached decided to dance for me… how beautiful. It did the perfect body ripple, wafting its “skirts” at us. Amazing. We hung around with it for a good few minutes so we could all get a glimpse before heading on our way. Next up was a turtle, what a dive! We had jumped in for a gentle drift and everything shows up… we also saw a huge shoal of jackfish, something we would expect on Shark and Yolande reefs more than Ras Ghozlani. Not a bad start to a lovely but slightly chilly day.
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So the other night I went to bed nice n early hoping to catch a few extra zzzz’s… but little did I know what was in store! It had been a weird day, kind of cloudy in the morning, and we had mentioned that rain had been predicted for the night. I had also noted that Monday looked pretty grim on the wind front too (never a good combination with diving). I had even brought the washing in (something we never have to do here), just in case the forecast came true, and had made sure my dive suits were well and truly attached to their hangers on the boat (again just in case). So back to my bed… I was soon woken by some thunderous grumblings in the distance, so ventured out onto our cliff to watch the impending doom approaching from the desert. In the distance I could see sheets of lightning over the mountains, followed by ominous rolls of thunder. It wasn’t long before these became huge flashes of light joined simultaneously by their earsplitting crashes of thunder. Of course by this stage I was tucked back up in my bed, looking out of our window that just happened to face into the oncoming storm. The lightning flashes were just continuous, like a strobe! None of this waiting around between strikes that I remember as a child, counting the seconds between flash then crash. It was all at once, and continual!! And then came the rain, proper torrential, thunderous, high-pressure-hose-like rain like I have never seen in Sharm before! Wow, I was impressed! So… I sat and watched. The storm sat right ontop of us for some time, before fading away, off to the East and across the rest of Sharm el Sheikh. Ahh, peace, we can sleep… hehe.. no such luck! We had three big storms land on us in the space of only a few hours, our house, being designed for the desert, soon started to show its cracks, and rain was just getting blown in through the gaps in the windows! Well who needs to seal them when it only rains properly once every five years or so? The cat spent the whole night hidden in a cupboard, eyes wide, thinking her little world was coming to an end, while I wandered the house, moving electrical items off the floors and plopping towels and rugs into the expanding puddle surrounding our bed. My neighbour didn’t fare quite so well… I popped round to find water flowing gently into her lounge, while upstairs, the air-conditioning unit had become a hose pipe, with water gushing out of it!! Shit! So by torchlight (thankfully the electric by this stage was out.. and not before time, I could hear it fizzing as the house got wetter and wetter) I went on the hunt for a bucket, rugs and towels, to at least try and stop the onslaught a touch. Thankfully it worked… to an extent. The next day, we woke to a newly washed and wet Sharm. Our pool could not be made out from the huge brown puddle spread across the patio… we went for a walk on the cliff to assess the scene in the Sea only to find weird patches of quick-sand like stuff, where the water had made the sand almost unstable! Ras Katy looked more like a muddy puddle too… you could see where the orange sand had just washed down into the sea, which looked positively opaque throughout the whole area! Wow! Needless to say there was no diving… well half the roads were flooded, so we couldn’t collect any guests, lightning was still flashing when I got up, there was no power, no phone lines, no moblie phones, no internet, no water supply. And even if we had dealt with the logistics and made it out on a boat, the viz looked shot to bits.. So it was a day off, which to be honest, most of us needed in order to dry out our homes… I think I have found three people who actually didn’t get flooded! Hehe.. With no phones, we took a wander around to see if friends were ok and to see if they needed help, but everyone seemed to be fine if a little soggy. Not much more than a bit of water. A few people had found their lap tops drowned, and the dive centre’s classroom was under a few inches of water. Some of the roads were flooded up to the car windows… not a good idea to drive today I feel. We were without power for about 20 odd hours, and I was just about to start cooking by candle light when lo! The lights turned on… Yay! It was only this morning that we got our mobile phones and therefore internet back however.. and our telly is still out Well, I guess that gives us all something to talk about for the next few days hehe.
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It is true! Once in a while we do get some freaky conditions over here, though thankfully it is rare, and normally only lasts a day or two. So this week, despite low winds, and some lovely sunshine, we have had some really dodgy swelly stuff coming in. And it is coming in from all directions, no sites seem to be sheltered or spared from this weird swell. We had waves crashing onto the beaches in the Gardens yesterday! Of course this has churned up all our lovely fine sand, resulting in a right old milky mess in the water. Yesterday we had visibility dropping to about a foot in places! Wow! Quite a novelty. Thankfully we only had small groups in the water, it would have been no fun with a group of 8 divers for sure. I was snorkel guide, thankfully, so was able to just bimble on the surface with my guests, although to be honest, it wasn’t the best example of Red Sea snorkelling. Hey ho, I guess that makes us appreciate that crystal clarity that we normally so take for granted
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Well this morning, we woke to a decidedly chilly feel (by comparison) and no sunshine! No way! Don’t say winter has finally decided to make an appearance. I guess, looking on the bright side, at least I now have my fantastic new DiveBunnie Hoodie to snuggle up in… and I guess that means that I might actually sell some too if people are getting chilly hehe. Anyway, back to the diving. Our location today is Ras Mohammed and all was looking lovely and flat as we left the jetty.
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So I can’t believe the first week of the year came and went! I have already taught my first course of the year, which turned into an Advanced course and since then, have been guiding, mostly in Ras Mohammed for some reason. Sharm is a little on the quiet side this week, so for the last couple of days I have only had between three and six divers! Lots of space to chill out on the boat. Today we were blessed with four dolphins (two couples I think) who circled us, dancing with each other, riding the bow of our boat. This sort of sight is not completely out of the ordinary, however these beauties stayed with us for about 45 minutes! Very very cool. Shark and Yolande reefs were very cool too, with a very big napoleon wrasse hanging about each time we dived it over the last few days. He comes right up close to say hello, which sadly indicates, that maybe someone is feeding him, but it is still quite a spectacular sight when he comes right up to you and starts eyeballing you in the hope of the snack he is never going to get. The currents were just perfect too, enough to drift nicely but not so much that there is any hard work at all! Excellent. Local has been pretty cool this week too… we have had a baby Oceanic White tip hanging around! He (or she) was in the gardens to start with, and first turned up at the back of our boat at lunchtime last week (again a little bit of a worry as someone might be throwing out food to cause this behaviour.. who knows). The baby has now moved location to the Temple and Ras Um Sid dive sites, where he has been spending the last few days. And.. to top it all, we have been bizarrely experiencing a bit of a heatwave! The air temperatures have been up in the high twenties, if not thirty degrees. And the sea is still around 24ºC which is at least a degree higher than normal for this time of year. I know that doesn’t sound particularly drastic, but believe me, it feels it. How random that the Northern hemisphere is wrapped up in snow while we bask in lovely sunshine. I am sure the winds and clouds will make an appearance before the winter is out for sure. We won’t get away with it that easily for sure.
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