Abu Nuhas & Gubal Strait

Almost nobody moors on the wrecks themselves. The hulls lie on the exposed north face, so day boats from Hurghada and El Gouna and the liveaboards working the northern circuit tie up in the lee on the south side and shuttle divers round by tender, dropping them above one ship and collecting them off another. A day trip usually covers two of the four, one before lunch and one after; boats that stay the night can be on the first wreck at dawn, before the day fleet arrives.

The four lie along the same slope and dive very differently. The Giannis D leans far enough over that corridors read as sloping shafts and divers lose track of which way is up, and she is the one that catches people out. The Carnatic is frame and beam rather than enclosed space, daylight coming through from every side, so little of her counts as true overhead. The Chrisoula K still has tiles stacked in her holds; the Kimon M's lentil cargo is long gone, and lying furthest east she is the first dropped from the plan when the sea is up.

The names are less settled than most briefings suggest. The 1869 steamer is documented, but wreck researchers have disagreed for years over which of the later hulls is which, and the tile wreck in particular goes by more than one name depending on whose book your guide read; the labels in general use are convention rather than a settled verdict. What is not disputed is the reef's position on the northern shipping lane up the Gulf of Suez, which carried traffic to Suez before the canal opened and a great deal more after it.

The Gubal Strait is where the boats spend the night, which makes it the obvious dive after dark: shallow wreckage on a sand and coral slope, easy to navigate by torch, with the boat's lights drawing in animals that stay hidden by day. Taken together this is unusually forgiving wreck diving, shallow and well lit, limited more by weather than by the diving itself. The reward is structure, cargo and light rather than anything in the blue, so divers after pelagics should look offshore.