Categories

Recent Entries
Archives

June 28, 2005

Dire Straits of Tiran

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Sharm el Sheikh/Ras Mohammed, Egypt:

At 6 AM, after another night of sleeping aboard the dive boat, we motored off from Sharm to the Straits of Tiran. The entry-point from the greater Red Sea into the much narrower Gulf of Aqaba, the Straits of Tiran are actually Saudi Arabian, although that country ceded Tiran Island and the area nearby to Egypt for use as a military installation (against Israel). While the island and territories are strictly off-limits to visitors by land, diving there is permitted and considered to be absolutely top-notch, though not for beginners. In practice, however, plenty of beginners dive the Straits of Tiran. The only prerequisite is that they have money to pay.

After a two-hour ride we reached Jackson Reef, a site known for numerous shark and large pelagic sightings. My dive group still consisted of Adam, the Kiwi and two Germans, but Italian dive master David ("Fabio") had left us back at Sharm the evening before and been replaced with tall, athletic Anna from Serbia. Looking out at the water, Anna decided that the currents were not very strong and that we should get in the water quickly before they picked up. We did so; this time around our group was the first one in.

Unfortunately, the general lack of current also translated into a general lack of large fish. There were some nice corals, particularly the giant sea fans down near 100 feet below, but other than a couple of green turtles, we didn't see much. The current picked up to a moderate flow toward the end of the dive, at which point a crewman from the boat picked us up in a 10-man semi-inflatable.

When the other groups were safely back onboard, we cruised around the reefs for a while, heading over to narrow Woodhouse Reef. On the way we saw something quite unexpected: a pod of dolphins that were not dolphins. When I first heard people calling excitedly to look at the dolphins, I thought oh, alright, more dolphins. I suppose I have started to take them a little for granted because I've been lucky enough to see them not just from the deck of a boat but in the water during a dive as well (back at Aliwal Shoal in South Africa). As I watched, it occured to me that these dolphins were rather big. And white (a mottled white and marble grey). And not-very-dolphin-looking. At that moment one of the dive masters came over to the deck and said very matter-of-factly, "those aren't dolphins; they're beluga whales."

And so we had a group of perhaps 12 or 15 of these creatures, maybe about 10 feet in length --- give or take --- racing the boat and flipping onto their sides to check us out. They seemed to be having a good time of it, dodging across the bow and blowing water up through their spouts as they went. Some people wanted to stop the boat so we could get in the water with them, but this didn't appeal to the captain, who probably didn't want his boat to become one of the several noticeable wrecks lying in shambles off of the surrounding reefs. For every one of those, there were probably three or four more boats at the bottom of the sea nearby.

For our second dive we tied up at Woodhouse Reef. There were dozens of boats nearby and more coming in every minute. Groups of snorkellers thrashed around near the coral, some of them dangerously close to the divers who were doing their giant-stride entries into the water. Plenty of boats were moving back and forth, positioning and re-positioning themselves close to all of these people, their motors humming and buzzing loudly. It was just short of chaos.

Anna wanted to make this a boat dive, meaning that we would go down the reef until we had half a tank of air left, then turn around and swim back. We started off fine, swimming in a light current. Then, twenty minutes into the dive, the current picked up and began moving us rapidly along the reef. At this point, one of the less experienced divers signaled a half tank of air --- and also seemed to be in a bit of a panic because of his inexperience in real current. Anna handled the matter as badly as I have ever seen or hope to see a dive master deal with the situation: She signalled for us to turn around, then abruptly bolted full-speed ahead into the current without regard for her group. All I can say for her is that she is very fit and very strong. None of the divers she left behind could remotely keep up. I'd been on over 80 dives, many of them in strong current and surge, and Adam, himself a dive master, had about 120 under his belt. Nevertheless, we'd never been forced to swim directly against strong current because the general rule is that this wastes your air and energy and is (duh) therefore dangerous. As a result, we both made slow, plodding progress, kicking hard to move and consuming a lot of air. The other divers didn't have nearly as many dives and could barely make any headway at all --- they were struggling simply to stay put. Nevertheless, Anna didn't even look back as she swam and soon became a distant shape on the edge of our vision. When she did turn her head, she slowed a little, but didn't come back. Adam and I exchanged angry glances; here we were swimming against a strong current on the return portion of our dive, something you are never supposed to do. We each had about half a tank of air at this point, but the diver who had signalled half a tank was now already down to 50 bars of pressure (a quarter of a tank, the point at which you are supposed to begin your safety stop and exit the water) and the others were close to that. One of the strangest, stupidest things about Anna's decision to bolt back against the current was that she didn't instruct us to ascend at all. Perhaps she was concerned that the current was stronger toward the surface; nevertheless, at 60 feet below, we were using a lot of air. Adam and I decided that since our dive master was effectively abandoning her group, we would take over. We took the other divers up slowly to about 30 feet, then to 15 feet for a safety stop. At this point Anna began to creep back toward us, though she kept a bit of distance and worked to grip onto some rocks while Adam and I dealt with calming the diver lowest on air and getting him and everybody else into a group and near some shallow rocks. Unfortunately, two of the divers were kicking and thrashing without regard to the coral and I am sure some of it was damaged badly. This is the sort of thing that happens when a dive master leaves a group of inexperienced divers to fend for themselves --- one or two of whom probably had no real business diving in an area known for these strong currents.

Eventually we came up to the surface. We swam slowly back toward the cluster of boats and after a few minutes, the semi-inflatable raft came out to get us. Back on the boat we were all furious with Anna; Adam was screaming at her. I had reservations about doing a third dive with her again. She defended her decision to turn around, but couldn't satisfactorily explain why she had taken off without everybody else. She insisted that the current wasn't really so very strong. She then began telling the other dive masters that she wanted an easier location for the third dive because her group couldn't "handle current." I confronted her about this and told her and the other dive masters that we were fine with current, so long as she didn't plan on swimming back directly against it at the end of a dive and at 20 meters. In other words, if we were going to do a third dive in current, that dive would be another drift dive, as the second dive rightfully should have been.

After all of the uproar, the third dive was the best of the day. On the other side of Woodhouse Reef we dove along a steep wall of coral, passing many groups of tropical fish, several turtles, and a few giant black moray eels that leered at us from inside their caves. At the end of the dive there was a little bit of confusion because there were so many other divers nearby that it was difficult to determine where all the members of the group were. Nevertheless, nobody went missing, not even Anna.

I decided that that was to be my last dive in the Red Sea on this trip. It seemed time to move on. While I enjoyed most of the dives I'd had in my two days in Sharm, the experience didn't relieve my concern that an unacceptably high rate of the diving done is irresponsible and that some of it borders on reckless. The Red Sea is a spectacular diving location, but perhaps too popular. It remains to be seen what toll the divers and snorkellers will take on the environment, but another concern is the toll they take on one another.

[I'm a little conflicted criticizing Sharm now because a lot of decent people make their living with the dive industry there and, after the Al-Qaeda bombing, I don't want to see them lose their livelihoods as a result. I doubt that will happen, however. I think that Sharm will bounce back before long.]

Posted by Joshua on June 28, 2005 01:32 PM
Category: Egypt (Again)
Comments
Email this page
Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):




Designed & Hosted by the BootsnAll Travel Network