Today we were heading North up into the gulf of Aquaba and to the Straits of Tiran. Here we have some great diving caused by a couple of natural elements. Firstly you have a very deep gulf that tends to result in crystal clear water (unless it is rough) and secondly you have a large body of water being squeezed between the Tiran Island and the Sinai peninsula. Into this bottleneck you have four reefs jutting up from the depths, and as you can imagine, whilst the inevitable currents make the dives challenging, these very currents bring a heap of nutrients that result in a collection of reefs simply heaving with colour and life.
So first dive out was Woodhouse, which was very lovely, drift with a reversed current, so we were able to drop on the canyon and see a glowing red anenome at 27M that we very rarely get to see when diving it in the usual direction.
The second dive was Jackson Reef. This is a glorious dive, however can get very busy if you are unlucky with your timing. You can jump in and realise that there are loads of other divers, and not all the guides are that respectful of other divers in the water. Today we were lucky and pretty much had the reef to ourselves.
Our boat was moored on the garden itself (not always ideal as the current can get a bit hairy at this point), so we kind of had to do a bit of a zig zag dive winding our way up from the depths. We couldn’t go too far in either direction due to a reasonably lively current today, but to be honest, we were moored above such glorious corals, that it really did not matter.
Not long into our dive, I got a signal from George (my hubby and fellow guide today) letting me know that there was an eagle ray kicking around. Great stuff! So I kept my eyes out to the blue on the hunt! Sure enough… five minutes later we were greeted with a lovely big eagle ray gliding around the shoals of snappers and fusiliers. We got an initial glimpse before it was off on its merry way. Ah, nice.
Another five minutes passed and I saw a frantic pointing from one of my guests! Yay… it was back, and this time we got the full monty, a circle, it flew over my head, so close I could see its gills opening and closing, then kind of came head on at me before looping off again in search of plankton. Wow! Wonderful!
We didn’t need to see anything else really after that, but guess what, a turtle decided to turn up about half way through the dive, so again we got the chance to chill out and watch her have her lunch. All very cool.
Of course all this was on top of the usual splashes of colour and crowds of other fish that we get here. There are some little alcoves, that just look like perfect snap shots of ideal cartoon reef. Lovely dive.
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