H2O Magazine

Abu Hashish sounds like it has something to do with drugs and some people say that this reef got its name from the contraband cargo of a boat that once hit it. Others say that hashish also means seaweed in fisherman slang; something you find in some shallower bits of the lagoon here. The boats mostly moor up inside the lagoon, on the west side of the main reef where the depth is around4m-7m.

This dive can be done as a drift, or from the mooring and back. If you go from the mooring you first have to swim through a small channel in the reef. Here it’s no more than 2m in depth so waves and current can make the passage tricky.
 
Think about your buoyancy. When you are through, you swim a bit up north and turn around for a look back. This is what it is going to look like when you are on your way back. Memorize! One landmark is the small coral tower where you turn right into the channel.

Sharks, Dolphins, Mantas, Jacks, Nudibranchs and Clownfish, the list goes on and on. If you are after variety then The Southern Red Sea is the place to be. Underwater nature is forever changing with the seasons; it is a spectacular, full of surprises, unforgettable image.   

It was one of these early and calm afternoons during the summer months, somewhere at a dive site entry along the fringing reefs of South Sinai. The near-shore reef flat area at this site was covered with rounded boulders and smaller stones derived from ancient, massive river floods which once transported these materials there from the mountainous hinterland, many thousands of years ago. All these rocky surfaces were more or less overgrown by turf algae, partly seaweed, and who knows which variety and amount of invertebrates found shelter and feeding substrate at this very location.

So there we were in the wilderness that is the Southern Red Sea. Our only engine had fallen silent. Bits of the Turbo were spread all over the dive deck and there was a lot of head shaking from Hisham, who’s dancing talents it seemed to us far outstripped his engineering skills. The mainland we were told was somewhere over the western horizon, but anyway was scorching uninhabited desert. If there was any human habitation it was the Egyptian military who would immediately arrest us and throw us in jail, if we were not shot first. Yasser imparted this information with his usual broad grin. I returned the smile although the funny side of the situation wasn’t totally apparent. We had already been desperately trying to contact anyone in the area but the VHF just hissed emptily back at us.

By: Chris Wood

The Red Sea is home to some of the most beautiful coral reefs in the world with many endemic species living on them, (meaning they are only found in the Red Sea).

There are many pressures upon this great natural resource including tourism and associated activities such as coastal development and the local fishing industry.

With the Red Sea having a little too much of the good things on offer, it’s easy to retreat into clichés when writing about diving there. Aquamarine, turquoise, azure, pristine, crystal clear, gin-clear, mind-blowing, brilliant, gorgeous, luxuriant, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and (my own favorite)… heaps. There’s also so much already written about the Red Sea, this has been another problem since I started this assignment – how do you make a new approach when covering good boats operating in good areas? It’s hard to write something fresh about the Red Sea, but I’ll give it a go.
Simply put, the Red Sea is the best diving in the world. Sure, Micronesia’s Truk Lagoon is the place to go (cliché: hotspot) for wrecks, but it isn’t famous for big fish and the vis isn’t always great. Indonesia has a large diversity (cliché: richness) of marine species and incredibly thick layers of invertebrate growth, but again the visibility isn’t always the best and it can be expensive. Fiji has lots of colour, better visibility and lots (cliché: thousands) of small colourful reef fish, but it’s not famous for big fish and it too, can be expensive. The Coral Sea with its large pelagics and sharks, but no wrecks. Maldives has (cliché: awesome) drift diving but since El Nino bleached its reefs in 1998…!? Sure, other places may have individual aspects of interest, but the Red Sea has more ticks on that all important list of “What Divers Want” than any other place in the world.

Endemic marine lives are those that occur only at the RED SEA and nowhere else in the world. The intention of this series of article is to spot the attention of the Red Sea lovers for this kind of rare animals to do their best to protect them, as this is the only realm at which you can only find.

CAUSES OF ENDEMISM The changing world - the theory of continental drift suggests that between 200 and 80 million years ago the single 'supercontinent' Pangea broke up into areas now recognizable as our modern continents.

Once areas became isolated from each other, their animal and plant life evolved indifferent way. The end of the Red Sea (Bab el Mandeb) the channel that separates it from the Gulf of Aden is narrow and shallow. This restricts the flow of water between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and hence restricts the movement of reef fish. The consequence is that many fish species in the Red Sea, particularly reef fish such as butterfly fish, have evolved in relative isolation from their cousins outside. This results in distinct species that are endemic to the area. More than 1000 species of fish can be found in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, these are all considered here as Red Sea endemics.
Lets give you two example from fishes and corals.