Sudanese Red Sea

Everything happens from the boat. Trips run a week or more, crossings between reef systems are often made overnight, and there is no second operator down the road and no walking away from a poor forecast. Days settle into three or four dives, the last of them a night dive on whatever the boat is moored to, and briefings are built around drops into moving water and tender pickups downstream rather than swims back to a fixed ladder.

The reefs rise straight out of deep water, so a typical dive has a wall on one shoulder and open blue on the other, with the animals concentrated at the corners and plateaus where the current splits. Hard coral cover is generally in good condition, helped by how few boats work the area. Current is the governing factor: it decides which side of a reef gets dived at all, it sets the order of the day, and drifting away from the mooring is the normal plan rather than the exception.

The wreck diving is unusually generous. The Umbria lies over on her side in the lee of a reef close to Port Sudan, her upper works near enough to the surface that daylight reaches well inside, and big enough to repeat across several dives without covering the same ground; her holds still carry aircraft bombs alongside the cement and vehicles, reason enough for guides to run the inside conservatively. How her crew managed the scuttling in June 1940, as Italy entered the war, is told differently from source to source. Out on Shaab Rumi the hangar built for Cousteau's diving saucer and the fish pens beside it sit shallow on the shelf, usually tacked onto a wall dive rather than given a slot.

This is a trip for experienced, self-sufficient divers. Boats are plainer than the Egyptian fleet, spares and servicing are a long way off, and chamber access cannot be assumed, so conservative profiles matter more here than they would further north. Divers who want short flights, dependable departures and an easy fallback plan will be happier elsewhere in the Red Sea. Those who accept the logistics get reefs where their own boat is usually the only one on the mooring.