Coral Garden

The dive

Coral Garden is not really a separate trip. It is the shallow reef that surrounds the Canyon, 15 minutes north of Dahab by road, and H2O Divers describes it as a beautiful coral garden shaped like a slightly opened shell wrapping the Canyon site. Our coordinates put it 50 m from our Canyon row, so the two pages describe one stretch of reef read two ways: the Canyon is the roofed crack you drop into, Coral Garden is everything on top of it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because it changes who the site is for. The Canyon is an overhead environment entered at about 20 m with a floor at 30 m and needs Advanced Open Water. The garden around it is a shallow hard-coral reef along the top of a wall roughly 12 m high, behind a lagoon that opens to the sea through a crack in the reef table, and H2O Divers lists it as suitable for snorkelling. A great many people dive here, do the loop over the coral without ever entering the crack, and get the better half of the site.

The occurrence records for this position are the standard Dahab coastal set, and identical to Rick's Reef and the Tropitel house reef a few hundred metres away because a 1.5 km sampling box cannot separate them: twoband anemonefish and scalefin anthias lead, then sergeant majors, Red Sea bannerfish, speckled sandperch, masked pufferfish, purple tang, slate-pencil urchins, broomtail wrasse and giant clams, with regal angelfish, bluespotted ribbontail ray, lionfish, grey moray, day octopus and cornetfish behind. The dive centres add Napoleon wrasse, octopus and stingrays specifically for the garden. One thing does not belong to the garden: the Fishbowl grotto, a glassfish-filled hole at the top of the Canyon, has been closed to diving since the end of 2007 after years of diver damage, and it stays closed.

• The shallow hard-coral reef wrapping the Canyon, 15 minutes north of Dahab
• Snorkellable, unlike the Canyon it surrounds
• Napoleon wrasse, octopus and stingrays are what the centres promise here
• The Fishbowl grotto at the top of the Canyon has been closed to diving since the end of 2007

Conditions

A shallow lagoon behind a reef table, a coral garden along the top of a reef wall about 12 m high, and the mouth of the Canyon in the middle of it. Difficulty and current are both rated two out of five by the local centres - moderate, not demanding.

On current: No source publishes a depth range for Coral Garden in its own right - every figure we found belongs to the Canyon inside it. Circle Divers describes a shallow lagoon opening to the sea through a crack in the reef and a reef wall around 12 m high with the coral garden running along its edge; H2O Divers puts the Canyon's entry at 20 m. We therefore record 5-20 m as the garden's band, from the lagoon to the Canyon's mouth, and deliberately do not import the Canyon's 30 m floor or its 52-55 m technical exit, which are inside the crack and not on the reef. Difficulty and current are both rated two out of five. No visibility figure specific to this site was found.

Dives & underwater footage