Dahab trip report
My wife Ruth and I fancied a little break before the winter started, to do some more warm water diving. We first dived in Thailand in May, and then did some more in the UK over the summer, so when we went away we were both PADI OW with 14 dives logged. We were looking for somewhere to go just to build some experience and see lots of corals and fish. We were not going looking for wrecks, or really for big stuff. We're new enough to diving that we're still easily amused.
We talked about various different destinations including Malta and Sharm el Sheik, but some of the instructors we had dived with from Edinburgh recommended Dahab as an alternative. The main reason for this is that most of the diving is shore diving, so for those without much expereince it's very relaxed and most of the dives can be accomplished without going very deep - being limited to 18m is not really a problem. They specifically recommended Reef2000 Dive Club to us, and the attached Bedoiun Moon Hotel. We booked these ourselves directly by e-mail, and bought Thomas Cook Airways flights from Glasgow separately. We had no problems getting an extra 10kg allowance for divers, and paying for extra legroom seats meant we had a very comfortable flight. I can honestly say the service, food, punctuality were beyond fault!
The hotel was pretty much as it had been described to us. It was clean and very friendly, but providing fairly basic accomodation. A little refurbishment of the rooms (especially the en-suite bathrooms) wouldn't go amiss and I wouldn't call it luxurious, but at €49 per room per night for an air-conditioned room (thats including breakfast) I think it was very good valiu. The other hotel recommended by Reef2000 is the Hilton, which I am sure is nicer and is certainly correspondingly more expensive. Reef2000 will pick you up pretty much anywhere in the area though, and we greatly enjoyed diving with them and thought it was pretty good value for money. A range of sites was available each day, with boat and camel trips for the more adventurous.
We rented regs/BCDs (we had the rest ourselves) and they were typical battered but serviceable Scubapro kit. We didn't really have any problems with it.
Dive Sites
The following are some of the main dive sites in the area. There are many others, but these are the ones that we went to and found memorable.
Canyon - Spectacular crack in the sea floor, which is generally at about 18m. The bottom of the canyon is at about 31m. Very pretty, also spectacular to watch all the air trapped in the roof of the canyon bubbling through the surrounding seafloor. The around the canyon (sometimes called Canyon Gardens) is a real gem though, with plenty of life and pretty coral formations.
Bells to Blue Hole - The reef here goes from the surface down to hundreds of metres, almost vertically. The entry is at bells, a crack in the reef a couple of metres wide and deep. You descent inside this crack to about 25m, where there is an archway, which you come out under onto the wall. Emerging like that into the blue with the vertical wall extending in all directions is a very, very impressive experience. You then swim along the wall to blue hole - which you enter over a 5m or so deep entry typical of the lagoons in the area - although this lagoon is very, very deep. Tekkies can head down to an arch at 60m, but we just swam across. Impressive underwater terrain, animal life not that exciting!
Gabr el Bint - This was the one boat trip we took, organised by Reef2000 but on a boat owned by Sinai Divers - the Ganet 6. Very comfortable boat with great food - as long as the sea is calm. It rolled a lot on the way back when the breeze had picked up a bit of a swell. The site is a sloping coral wall that drops off to about 50m enclosing a sandly lagoon about 13-14m deep, with coral outcrops. The wall is impressive, especially some of the gregonian fans which are several metres across, but the lagoon is truly beautiful. This was my personal favourite site.
Eel Garden - Sandy sloping bank with coral outcrops. The reason for diving here though is to see the huge colony of garden eels which live in vertical burrows in the sand. They comue up out of their burrows appearing to grow from the seabed, 30cm or so tall and the thickness of a finger. They sway gently, occasionally twisting and contorting to pick some morsel out of the passing water!
Islands - A real coral maze, several large islands of coral with passages and pools riddling them. I was fairly lost on this dive - fortunately our guide knew exactly where we were! Great test of control swimming though all the narrow bits, but we were up to it and didn't hit anything! Lots of large parrtofish on the reef, and also a resident shoal of several hundred yellowtail barracuda.
Training
While we were out there we did the Advanced Open Water course. The adventure dives we did were deep, navigation, night, multilevel and underwater photographer. They were fairly flexible about when we did the course, and about which adventure dives we did, but the final list wasn't necessarily all our first choices.
We had both read the book carefully, and we both had our own computers for monitoring dives. Boy were we glad. We didn't really get any instruction beyond being told to read the book, and briefings before the dives. We were not encouraged to plan any dive (except the multilevel). Although we were asked to hand in our knowledge reviews, the instructor told us just to copy the answers from the book, and made no effort to check them or go over them with us. The standard was pretty poor compared with the instructors we had previously. We read and understood the book, planned our dives etc, but the rest of the guys training with us...
We were also disappointed to note that we were the only ones that stayed buddied up at all during the dives, the rest were all over the place and the instructor didn't seem interested in telling them to buddy up. I know some of the other instructors running OW courses seemed to be being more thorough so I think this is an instructor rather than Reef2000 issue
This was a standard far, far short of the training we have had elsewhere.
Conclusions
I would throroughly recommend Dahab as a diving destination, and we were happy with the hotel and dive club kit and guides. We had some reservations about the training we had from our instructor, but can't really comment on the other instructors at the club of which there are many!
I would definitely go back there again to the same hotel and dive club, and would especially recommend it to those who enjoy a relaxed atmosphere and not having to mess about on boats every day!
