Abu Dabab III

The dive

Abu Dabab III is one of a numbered chain of reefs called Shaab Abu Dabbab, lying roughly 4 to 6 km off the coast between Port Ghalib and Marsa Alam, about 27 to 30 km north of Marsa Alam town. Local fishermen numbered the reefs from north to south, which is why the sites carry the Arabic ordinals: Wahid, Ithnain and Thalata are reefs one, two and three. Sources count six or seven reefs in the formation. Thalata is the larger and more southerly of the two eastern reefs that make up Abu Dabbab North, and along with Ithnain it is the pair operators actually dive; many day boats sell reefs 2 and 3 as one dive rather than two.

This is not the Marsa Abu Dabab bay with the dugongs. That is a ticketed seagrass lagoon on the shoreline several kilometres inshore of here, and it is a separate site. Out here you are on an offshore hard-coral reef reached by speedboat or zodiac, with no beach and nothing to snorkel back to.

The dive is a drift over hard coral and white sand. On Thalata two pinnacles stand facing each other about 40 m apart, which is the feature guides brief and the place divers shelter when the flow picks up. The reef's south side carries tunnels, but they are narrower than the caverns on Ithnain and are treated as an experienced-divers-only feature rather than part of the standard route. Maximum depth on the normal profile is around 18 to 20 m, with sand and scattered coral heads below that.

In the channel beside the reef, at about 13 m, lies the Heaven I (also written Heaven One), a dive boat that caught fire and sank in 2005. Its superstructure has largely gone, but the steel hull is coral-encrusted and both engines are still visible, and it is usually tacked onto a reef 2 or reef 3 dive rather than dived on its own.

• Two pinnacles about 40 m apart on the reef itself
• The Heaven I wreck at about 13 m in the adjacent channel: coral-covered hull, two engines still in place
• Narrow tunnels on the reef's south side for experienced divers
• Hard coral over white sand with blue-spotted ribbontail rays sheltering in the acropora
• Usually combined with Abu Dabbab 2 (Ithnain) as a single boat dive

Conditions

A drift over hard coral and white sand in 5 to 20 m, with the boat following. Current is normally low to medium and its direction is checked from the surface before the drop. There is no shelter and no shallow lagoon; the reef sits below the surface offshore, so surface conditions are whatever the day gives you.

On current: Operators rate the current low to medium and dive the reef as a drift. What is unusual here is the cause: the flow is described as driven by thermoclines where warm and cold water meet rather than by the tide, so it is checked from the boat immediately before the dive and the group is dropped to run north or south depending on what it is doing that hour. The two pinnacles on Thalata are the shelter if it strengthens. Sources disagree on visibility: one Marsa Alam operator gives 10 to 30 m, an aggregator gives 25 to 40 m; we have taken the lower band, so treat 20 m as the conservative reading rather than a measurement.