Hurgahda (by David Cumber)

Most divers will have heard of Sham El Sheik. But Hurgahda is now as practically well known. Hurghada is further south, set on the West side of the Red Sea. There is meant to be some shore diving, but I never tried it. Most dive sites are an hour away from shore. The dive shops normally take you out all day on the boat, and you get a couple of dives in. Food is served on the boats or you can take your own. With traveling and surface interval times, you will be out for quite a few hours. There isn't much else in Hurghada, the main reason for going is diving. LOTS of building work is going on. With large resorts that have all the facilities you would need, and most people travel there this way. But there are other simpler hotels, without the resort feel. That's how I did it, just booked the hotel, and checked out the dive shops when out there. The shops charge for the trip out/dive and extra for gear hire, so if you can take you own gear it would be cheaper.

There are ten's of named dive sites here, and you wouldn't be able to dive them all, unless you had a few weeks to spare. But considering the amount of dive sites there are, you may find yourself diving the same site more than once. The boats are quite large, so you sometimes end  up sharing a boat with many divers with different experience levels. To make it easier the boats often visit the same sites for easy conditions (or the closest sites to cut traveling time). Depends what you are after and your experience, but it is worth checking out a few operators, big isn't always beautiful. The water is a high of 30C, during the summer, dropping down to 19-20C during the winter. Visibility will range from 10-25M. As for the sites:

Gota Abu Ramada (East) and Gota Abu Ramada (West) , are two sides to a circular reef system that nearly reaches the surface. It's a very shallow dive site, with the bottom at 12-14M. The main reef is like one big coral outcrop, with little coral bombies spreading out from the main center reef. The hard coral is fantastic, some of the brain corals are a couple of meters across. The fish life was a little disappointing when I was there. Most of the fish were hugged close the the main reef. There were black snapper, groups of butterfly fish, oriental sweet lips and trumpet fish. The variety was okay but the numbers small. The dive sites often have several boats on it. I was there during the quiet season, but there were still six or seven boats on each site, with 10+ divers on each boat. Whether, to many divers on the site has scared some of the marine life away I don't know, but it can't help. So you won't have a dive without seeing other groups. On the 'West' dive site there is a fantastic pinnacle. It is a really large pinnacle, several meters across and about 10M high. It is on a flat sandy bed so it really stands out. Large fan's and barrel sponges, nice place to to plonk yourself on the sand and watch the fish go by.

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Really nice dive sites. The coral is in excellent condition, and with it being so shallow, a lot of the color is not lost. With very little current as well these sites are excellent for photography. One thing is that all the dive sites have mooring buoys for the boats, so the boats don't have to drop there anchors (which is great). Remember, that means you have to get back to the boat! No current, no problem, should you get left then you will be making a surface swim back.

Banana reef , is a reef shaped like a 'banana', believe it or not. The banana is surrounded by sand with little bombies. The reef was in good condition. Here, though, there is some current and it was hard work getting back to the boat. When I first went in I could feel the current, traveling away from the boat. Straight away your thinking about how far you should go before turning round. Another shallow dive. Abu Ramada Cave (East), was described to me as a steep slope, with large marine life and a cave. This dive site does not have a cave. This dive site has a large bombie overhang, which isn't big enough for a diver to fit in. Although, I did see attempts to enter it, which caused severe damage to any coral within grabbing distance. Now the dive was a steep slope, and it looked like the kind of dive site where you could bump into something big. I saw a rather large napoleon wrasse here, who followed me around for a while. I believe that divers used to feed fish a lot here, but that it has been stopped (thankfully). But, the marine life still take quite an interest in the divers just in case lunch is offered. The slope is not in the best of conditions, some damage to the coral. A bit of a current here that can push you towards the slope, and there were a couple of times when I saw divers brushing against the slope. This site can go quite deep, at around the 30M mark in parts I still couldn't see the bottom, and the vis was 15M.

This is an area that can offer some world class diving, and it would be nice to hear from people with more diving experience here.

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