Big Brother East

The dive

Big Brother is a single small island in the Brothers (El Akhawein), 60 to 70 km off El Quseir in the open Egyptian Red Sea, with a 19th-century lighthouse on it and a fringing reef that plunges steeply away on every side. "Big Brother East" is not a separate reef. It is the eastern route around that one island, the same island our Big Brother, Big Brother South and Big Brother - Numidia entries also cover, and a boat working the site will run all of them over a single day.

The dive is a wall drift. A zodiac drops you on the east side, usually with a negative entry so the group is off the surface before the current pushes it onto the reef, and you descend onto a face covered in black coral and large gorgonian fans with hard and soft coral between them. Some operators describe a shelf on the eastern side with low hills at roughly 36 to 45 m that gives shelter from the current; the recreational cap most boats brief here is 40 m. The prevailing set on both the east and west walls runs north to south, so an east-side dive normally finishes over the southern plateau rather than back where it started, and the pickup is a zodiac in open water.

What you look at depends on which way you face. Against the wall it is anthias, coral hind, blackside hawkfish, giant moray in the cracks and dense soft coral; out in the blue it is grey reef sharks, bluefin trevally, great barracuda, dogtooth tuna and humphead wrasse. Oceanic whitetips are the summer animal here and come in close, often at the safety stop. Thresher sharks are the dawn animal and are reported over the southern plateau rather than along this wall.

The two wrecks people associate with Big Brother, the 1901 cargo steamer Numidia and the 1957 supply ship Aida, lie off the north and north-west of the same island near the lighthouse landing. They are dived as their own routes and are not part of this one.

• One route around one small island, not a reef of its own
• Sheer east wall in black coral and gorgonian fans
• North-to-south current normally carries the dive onto the southern plateau
• Grey reef sharks in the blue; oceanic whitetips in summer
• Liveaboard-only, 60 to 70 km offshore, with a permit and a logged-dive minimum

Conditions

Open-ocean conditions with no lee except the island itself. Operators report visibility from 15 to 25 m at the low end and 20 to 30 m more usually, with some claiming much more in autumn; water is roughly 22 to 24 degrees in winter and 26 to 30 in summer. Wind and swell decide the day more than anything else, and spring brings the highest waves.

On current: Operators quote 1 to 4 knots at the Brothers and grade the dive by it: under 1 knot is an ordinary dive, 2 to 3 knots is run as a drift with a negative entry, a tight group and a mandatory SMB on ascent, and above 3 knots the exposed north tip is cancelled and only the sheltered south side is dived. On the east and west walls the set normally runs north to south, which is why an east-side dive is planned to finish on the southern plateau. It does reverse: a published trip report from this island describes a good south-to-north current on one dive and no current at all on another. Treat the briefing, not the average, as the plan.

Best months: May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov