There’s something wonderful about travelling in darkness and waiting for the sun to rise in a new location. The reveal. What’s it going to be like? Were the resort pictures accurate? Fortunately, Egypt is reliable. The first morning I woke to the familiar deep inky blue of the Red Sea with its dusty landscape border. Like many British divers, Egypt feels like my diving home away from home.
The Oasis Dive Resort is about 30km north of Marsa Alam itself or 250km south of Hurghada. The resort is hewn from local stone and stands defiantly in its desert setting. There’s no elegant planting, only rock lined dust paths leading to the 50 or so chalets dotted along the shoreline. The resort is centred around the main hotel building that contains the restaurant, bar and dive centre. The accommodation is clean and basic with no frills.
Unsurprisingly, the diving around Marsa Alam is governed by its coastal geography. Lacking good harbours or launches the majority of dives are done from the shore. This includes at the Oasis Resort which benefits from its own house reef directly in front of the hotel. The main advantage of this type of diving is it helps keep the diving stay affordable.
That afternoon, after a 20 minute bus ride down the coast, we were at Marsa Assalai for our checkout dive. I know checkout dives are necessary but it doesn’t stop me hating them as a concept – wasting a precious dive at a benign, less interesting site.
Our kit had been already been unloaded, sitting neatly boxed on a mat next to our regimentally ordered cylinders. After kitting up we walked into the water and descended. The first section of the dive was dull, and I spent much of it cursing the ‘checkout dive’, as we made our way out of the bay over a sandy bottom.
As soon as we turned the corner and met open water the reef burst to life. Undulating outcrops of fire coral with Red Sea bannerfish, groupers and a massive porcupine fish. It was a shame we had to endure a lengthy swim at 2m to get here.
Sinai Divers & Werner Lau
The dive centre at the Oasis is a joint venture between Sinai Divers and the German dive centre group Werner Lau. The dive centre is almost painfully organised with multiple (colour coded!) sign-up sheets, lists and instructions. On arrival we were given a detailed walkthrough on exactly how we should pack our dive crates after diving – I wanted to avoid using the low-hanging fruit of national stereotypes but it was, well, all very German.
That shouldn’t be taken as a negative – it was excellently run. The all Egyptian team of instructors were equally professional – long gone are the old days of Red Sea dive centres being fully staffed by sun kissed Europeans with Egyptians relegated to porters and boat staff.
Our next dives were considered to be for more advanced divers, not for the dive conditions but for the entry. Sharm Shuni and Ras Samadai involved rocky walks out and then entry via small pools in the reef top. It’s crucial that you are comfortable descending quickly to avoid being pushed back onto the reef. Once down you then swim through meandering gullies and caverns before emerging into calm coral gardens.
Abu Saille was a fantastic dive centred around a broad mushroom shaped pinnacle. The pinnacle is covered in amazing selection of varied hard and soft corals, anemones, and thick shoals of orange and purple anthias flitting in the gentle current. The pinnacle drops past 50m and beyond giving a welcome sense of depth and perspective that is often lacking on many shore dives.
The house reef was always available to add an additional dive to the day. If you’ve only ever followed dive guides on trips you should take the opportunity, if comfortable, to go unguided.It gives you the freedom to dive at your own pace and really look at behaviours that you’d otherwise swim past.
The Oasis has a purpose built diving jetty with benches to kit-up and well maintained metal steps for easy access into and out of the water. All you need to do is let the dive centre know a time, kit up without cylinder and walk down to the jetty to find your gas of choice ready to fit.
The house reef is a sloping wall facing the open sea. It has a good collection of familiar Red Sea marine life: anthia, hawkfish, groupers and anemones (sadly all of which appeared to be bleached). We were also treated with the occasional more unusual visitor such a scribbled filefish or a jack passing by in the blue. It was a treat to get to know a section of reef over multiples dives at different times of day.
However good shore dives are they do end up feeling a bit samey: sloping sandy bottoms, fringing reefs and no chance of pelagics. The availability of a number of excellent boat dives added some welcome variation.
Dolphin House is a roughly horse shoe shaped reef sitting a couple of miles offshore. The name is pleasantly literal – the site is home to a resident population of Spinner Dolphins. Access to the site is controlled both in terms of visitors per day and into designated zones for diving or snorkelling. However, it’s still a busy site. As we arrived there were large crowds of snorkelers bobbing and splashing on the surface in their fluorescent orange life jackets.
It may just be me but large groups of snorkellers always put me off a dive site. In some way they cheapen the diving experience and make it feel less adventurous (I’m precious, I know).
Fortunately, on descending we escaped the relative chaos taking place on the surface and got on with our dive. The first section includes the option for an extended swim through – the narrow passage runs for possibly 20m and has fissures in the ceiling letting shafts of light into the tunnel. At its entrance sits a huge anemone full of busy residents.
On exiting the swim through we made our way around a large pinnacle with collections of butterfly fish, batfish and a blue spotted ray resting on the sandy bottom below. However, the famous residents were nowhere to be seen.
The Big One: Elphinstone
I had only ever dived Elphinstone from liveaboards and to be honest had no idea it was possible to dive it from land. We met at the dive centre in darkness at around 0530 and after a short bus ride were loading our kit onto a RIB at a neighbouring resort.
One of the big draws of Elphinstone is the chance to see pelagics and fortunately we were in the middle of the Oceanic Whitetip season. Our RIB, fitted with two mammoth outboards, powered us out to the site in relative comfort in under 30 mins. Sitting low in the water we were dwarfed by the liveaboards already moored at the site, relative monsters compared to our plucky inflatable.
Our entering the water we quickly dropped down to around 25m and started moving along the steep reef wall. Elphinstone is a thin finger shaped reef running north to south and we made our way south down its eastern flank. It can be challenging trying to appreciate the amazing collections of hard and soft corals while trying to keep a spare eye out for anything large out in the blue.
The peaceful start to the dive was cut short. A group of 10 of so divers descended straight onto and then through our small dive team. Flailing arms and vertical postures hinted that they were perhaps not ready for this type of dive. As reef ends it steps down into a number of shallow plateaus and at this point it became clear how many divers were actually on the reef at the same time. I counted seven liveaboards when we arrived so that meant there were likely well over 100 divers on the reef that morning. With that quantity of divers in the water it was no surprise there were no oceanic whitetips in sight.
Final Thoughts
Marsa Alam has plenty of easy and beautiful shore dives with the option to (relatively easily) do some exciting boat dives. If you aren’t lucky enough to see a Dugong it does lack a ‘wow’ dive like the other Red Sea shore diving hotspot of Dahab and its famous Blue Hole. However, the shore dives in particular offer scenic and, crucially, quiet diving that definitely come as at a premium in the Red Sea today.
Read my guide to diving Marsa Alam here
