Diving from Marsa Alam

Liveaboards are great for single divers because you’re automatically paired with a buddy. When diving from land, one has to find a buddy. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not. Maybe that’s one of the reasons many dive shops have you do a check dive, a dive that proves to the dive shop you can dive. Oscar and I meet waiting for our check dive. He tells me his back went out at the registration desk. It just simply failed while he was filling out the registration form. His wife has already been diving for a few days, and now that he’s had some sort of shot, and some pain pills, he’s going to give it a try. He’s looks fine underwater, due to his dives numbering upwards of 1500, him having worked in dive shops, as a commercial diver, and as a navy seal in Holland. Unfortunately when he gets out of the water, his back pain returns. Not a good way to spend a dive holiday.

Oscar introduces me to his wife, Raquel. We dive the north house reef in the afternoon. She’s into sharks, and we find a small, four-foot long white tip shark. The house reef is long and beautiful, the coral is vast and in good shape despite it being dived so much. House reef dives are unlimited, depending upon your dive profiles each day. I do a “truck dive” the following morning, and Raquel and I go to Elphinstone. She wanted to go in the early morning to have the best opportunity to see sharks, but decides to go with me at one o’clock. I’ve heard it’s much less crowded and pretty with the sun shining on the western coast. We have five divers, including the guide, and only one other boat is there on other side of the reef. We’re excited to have it almost exclusively to ourselves, and high five each other when upon descending, we see a silky shark. Yeah for Raquel, who’s heard no one saw sharks on the morning. The wall is beautiful. The coral is colorful, pristine and even has some gorgonian fans, an uncommon coral it seems for this part of the world. To top off the dive, we watch a silky shark hovering around the liveaboard boat during our safety stop. Our guide has us go up one at a time in case the shark decided he wants to eat us for dinner.

Raquel and Oscar depart for the south so I go on an organized truck dive in the morning, and am happy to realize the organized dive in the afternoon is by Zodiac. So much simpler to go by boat than load all the gear up in our boxes, put it on the truck, get to the dive site, unload the truck on huge sandy tarps, get kitted up and finally into the water. This morning dive has us jumping into a pool, descend and go through some swim-throughs to get to the reef. Nice to see a spotted ray as we descend. Again the coral life here is amazingly beautiful. That makes seeing the fish that much better, kind of like touring an area that has interesting architecture versus dilapidated houses. The short Zodiac ride in the afternoon takes us past the south house reef where I spot a Bighorn Newbrothe nudibranch, vibrantly decorated in purples, reds, yellows with accents in black. Yes! These tiny crawly creatures are hard to spot. I lose the dive guide but there’s another buddy group behind me to show off my find. The dive guide later apologizes for abandoning me, but I had seen her go to the surface knowing she was cold.

Another day of truck dives shows me an octopus, a guitar ray, the teeth of a huge barracuda, a porcupine fish and all the millions of fish that make up the sea. I chat with Collin, a fellow American before realizing I have an early departure. It’s off to pack up the not-so-dry dive gear and to bed.